Campbell Vertesi, Microsoft | Red Hat Summit 2026

In this interview from Red Hat Summit 2026, Campbell Vertesi, chief technology officer of the Microsoft and Red Hat partnership at Microsoft, joins theCUBE's Rob Strechay and Rebecca Knight to discuss how the decade-long Microsoft and Red Hat partnership is evolving toward a unified open enterprise hybrid cloud. Vertesi reflects on a partnership that has grown from a historic bet into a deeply integrated platform for complex enterprise estates. He points to Banco Bradesco as a standout example — scaling from 100 AI services in production in year one to more than 500 compliant, audit-ready deployments within two and a half years — by combining Red Hat's operational stack with Azure AI as a unified policy and governance layer. The conversation also explores how OpenShift Virtualization, now available on Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO) following its Ignite 2025 launch, delivers roughly 75% of modernization benefits by migrating existing VMs as-is while enabling cloud-native operations — without forcing organizations to containerize every application. Vertesi introduces a "horizontal containerization" approach that lets teams extract and standardize shared components across their VM fleet. On security, he highlights confidential containers support on OpenShift and managed identity integration that extends Entra consistently across ARO workloads. He also details how the Azure MCP server is now listed in the Red Hat AI MCP catalog, enabling enterprises to interrogate their full hybrid estate through a single integration layer. From deepening Ansible's role as an auditor-recognized policy and automation engine spanning every device in a hybrid environment to a future shaped by the open enterprise hybrid cloud, Vertesi provides a roadmap for how enterprises can unify their Red Hat and Azure estates into a coherent, full-stack operating model. Find more SiliconANGLE news and analysis https://siliconangle.com/ Follow theCUBE's wall-to-wall event coverage https://siliconangle.com/events/ Learn about the latest theCUBE events https://www.thecube.net/ 00:00 - Intro 00:05 - Exploring Alliances: An Introduction with Campbell Vertesi 02:35 - Emerging Collaborations and Tailored AI Solutions in Business 05:04 - The Role of OpenShift Virtualization 07:30 - Integrating Identity: Open Source and AI in Modern Security 11:09 - Integrative Success: Azure Strategies and Campbell's Insights 14:20 - Future Horizons: Hybrid Cloud Partnerships and Outlook #theCUBE #RHSummit #theCUBEresearch #Microsoft #RedHat #HybridCloud #OpenShift