Horizon 2030 for Banking: A deep dive on virtual machines and AI workloads, from the perspective of a Chief Product Officer

Quick Summary

In the first of two additional-questions episodes of Horizon 2030 for Banking from Red Hat, Ashesh Badani, Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer, discusses the opportunity to run virtual machines, cloud-native applications and AI workloads on one platform, and why hybrid cloud has become the norm.

What Opportunity Does He Describe?

Ashesh notes that financial institutions have run mission-critical applications on virtual machines for many years. With the change in the market and the cost crisis that followed, he says there is now the opportunity to run VMs and containers, or cloud-native applications, on the same platform, which in Red Hat's case is OpenShift. One platform can orchestrate existing mission-critical applications alongside the new generation being built.

Does That Extend to AI?

He says it does. Red Hat is seeing more customers want to run their models, some developed in-house and some from third parties, as well as applications and agentic workflows, on the same platform. The question for enterprises, as he puts it, is whether one platform can run traditional applications, modern cloud-native ones and AI workloads. His answer is yes, and that more enterprises should take advantage of it.

Why Hybrid, and Why Sovereignty?

• He says it is increasingly difficult to see a modern enterprise operating in a non-hybrid world, with workloads in public cloud and in their own data centres, requiring consistency and portability across both.
• He highlights sovereignty as a growing factor, driven by regulation, governments, data restrictions and compliance.
• A hybrid cloud environment, in his view, lets enterprises meet those requirements while keeping the flexibility they want.

Find Out More

Red Hat Summit Connect comes to London on 8 October, bringing together the people building the next generation of banking infrastructure. Find out more and register here.

Watch every episode of Horizon 2030 for Banking from Red Hat on FF News, starting with the series trailer.