FF News Tattoo Studio: Red Hat on Open Source That Unlocks Banking’s Future

At the FF News Tattoo Studio during Sibos 2025, Armin Warda outlines his career path: 22 years in IT at major German banks, then four years at Red Hat as FSI Chief Technologist for EMEA. Warda brings a practitioner’s view of regulated, large-scale banking tech to Red Hat’s open-source strategy.

Why open source? Openness “unlocks the future.” and Red Hat argues the internet’s last-30-years progress rides on open source. That sets up Red Hat’s role: bridging community innovation and enterprise-grade operations. Banks want open-source pace but fear risk. Red Hat curates, secures, and supports the stack, RHEL at the core and OpenShift for cloud-native apps so regulated firms can modernize without gambling on unvetted components.

On culture and brand, Warda retells the “red hat” origin: the hat became Red Hat’s founder’s campus signal, “ask the person with the red hat”, which evolved into the company icon. (Commonly told: co-founder Marc Ewing’s distinctive red hat made him the go-to UNIX expert.) Customers still look for the “person with the red hat” when they need modern engineering to work in complex environments.

On IBM, Warda notes the 2019 acquisition while stressing Red Hat’s independent operation. The relationship is “asymmetric” as IBM builds new products, including Watson AI, and even mainframe workloads on RHEL and OpenShift, while Red Hat remains broadly partner-friendly

Armin Warda Red Hat OpenShift strategy is built on a core belief: openness unlocks the future. Whether it’s faster deployment, improved compliance posture, or AI-ready architecture, Red Hat empowers banks to build on proven infrastructure without getting locked into vendor silos.