Red Hat One 2026, a short recap

As part of our partnership with Red Hat for over 10 years, we were invited to their yearly internal kick-off event again in Las Vegas. A great event for many reasons! A chance to meet peers, catch-up with some old friends, share thoughts, have a laugh, do some critical thinking and discuss roadmaps, together.

Together with HCS company and Kangaroot we represented Tech Tribes in Vegas and aligned our strategic partnership with Red Hat for the year 2026, the open source way!

It is important to emphasize te way of working, because our Tribes work similarly to communities to deliver innovation, reliability and sustainable IT services to our customers. The open source software industry has been working like this for decades and we as Tech Tribes are doing the same because for us it is common sense. This is nothing new, but the effectiveness of this model and the extreme high level of knowledge you can get from it, keeps surprising me.

To be honest, this year I was quite skeptical what to expect. In a world where escalation is almost everywhere, where is the path forward? What would a US based company possibly do to address this?

But boy was I wrong.

There is -and has been- a lot of good stuff happening. And it is coming straight out of the communities to us. Open source is still, after all those years, leading the way in all relevant IT developments nowadays. Let me try to guide you through a couple of key take aways

Digital sovereignty has entered the arena, globally.

The pace and impact of this topic cannot be underestimated and Red Hat positions this rightfully as a differentiator. The demand is visible not only from “our” Tech Tribes region Europe, but  from all regions and countries, all over the world. This topic is much bigger on a global level than I expected at first. An guess what? Open source is proving to be a strong and viable foundation to address digital sovereignty issues. Red Hat demonstrates the power and flexibility of a community driven approach by adapting quickly and firmly to the needs of the community. Jeff and his team have proven to make huge progress all over the portfiolio. Not with slideware or “sovereignty washing” as some hyperscalers do, but with dialogue and execution power.

Private AI factories are at a rise

As the AI era unfolds, we are moving from experiments (PoC’s) to serious production deployments of AI Solutions. at scale. Red Hat sees this, but we at Tech Tribes also see this trend. Beyond chat tools (e.g., Gemini, Copilot), enterprises need model optimization, models as a service, security guardrails, MCP servers to integrate business systems, and scaled inference across infrastructure. The concept of Private AI factories (e.g. OpenShift AI) helps organizations to create, manage and orchestrate innovative AI solutions that use any AI agent working with any model, any accelerator, running on any cloud enabling AI in mission-critical environments.

Teaming up with NVIDIA

As enterprises scale from isolated AI pilots to full production, infrastructure becomes the new bottleneck. Red Hat and NVIDIA address this head-on by delivering a pre-integrated AI Factory that removes friction between experimentation and mission-critical deployment. By combining Red Hat’s hybrid cloud and AI platforms with NVIDIA AI Enterprise, optimized for NVIDIA accelerators (starting with Blackwell), organizations can run high-performance AI in a single, trusted environment.

Strong Private AI capabilities

Red Hat’s AI vision is built around turning AI into a secure, scalable, and open enterprise capability. With Models as a Service powered by BLON (Base Layer Open Networks) and LOMD (Lifecycle Orchestration & Model Delivery), Red Hat is creating an open, community-driven foundation for model lifecycle management. By acquiring Chatterbox Labs, Red Hat strengthens model security, validation, and hardening, making AI production-ready for regulated and mission-critical environments. With watsonx.ai teams and Docling Red Hat brings advanced prompt tuning, metadating and auto-RAG capabilities directly into the Red Hat ecosystem, accelerating AI adoption.

Metadata with AI

This is where everything comes together. Open Source software and subject matter experts (humans or agenst) classifying and demystifying data terms and ontologies. AI only creates value when it understands what data means, where it comes from, and how it may be used safely. At Tech Tribes, we are running a large-scale AI metadata enrichment programs for a couple of highly regulated public-sector organizations, where millions of documents are automatically classified, enriched, and validated with contextual metadata - securely, explainably, and fully compliant.

What started as a strategic necessity is now evolving into a real Private AI Factories in production: information becomes discoverable, knowledge becomes accessible, and AI assistants or agenst can support professionals to accelerate their output in a trustworthy way. This is not a future vision, it is operational today. And it proves the core truth: without metadata there is no context, without context no reliable AI, and without reliable AI no digital sovereignty.

Closing thoughts

We haven’t covered even 1% of all information that got to us. But you get an idea. Please stay tuned for more. We are looking back at a very exciting kick off event, and we are eager to drive the change in Europe with Enterprise Open Source. 2026 will be the year of sovereign AI in production, at scale. Entirely based on sovereign Enterprise open source software and services!