Red Hat’s EMEA CTO on AI, Edge & the Future of Hybrid Cloud
As hybrid cloud adoption accelerates in response to changing business needs, the intersection of open source innovation, data sovereignty and AI deployment is defining the future of modern enterprises.
Julio Guijarro, EMEA CTO at Red Hat, is part of the company’s global technology leadership.
With a background that includes 20 years at HP Labs, where he specialised in security and cloud research, Julio brings extensive expertise in enterprise IT and innovation.
In this Q&A with Technology Magazine, Julio shares his insights on empowering organisations to achieve seamless, secure and scalable hybrid cloud operations — enabling AI, compliance and digital resilience across industries.
How does Red Hat contribute to the hybrid cloud space?
If we take it back to just the basics, Red Hat’s strategy has always been to drive everything through open source. We’re part of the community. We take open source and we make it available in the right way for enterprises — in fact, we’re an enterprise software company based on an open source development model.
We are one of the leading software providers around hybrid cloud. This has been part of our strategy for a number of years now and it’s becoming even more critical.
Hybrid was, in our belief, going to be the way software would be delivered. But today, with anything related to sovereignty, it’s becoming more and more important.
It’s about how you interconnect, how you have things running on the edge — running in factories or in data centres either owned or managed by somebody else — and even the hyperscalers of the cloud. The software that we have allows you to do that across all of them.
Our strategy is to be able to deploy and manage your software — including AI — in the same way that you do on the cloud that you do on-premise or on edge.
Something is always critical here, and that’s security. It has to be delivered in a way that is consistent across the portfolio so we minimise the impact on managing those systems for our customers.
How is Red Hat enabling organisations to seamlessly deploy and run AI inference workloads across hybrid cloud environments? What are the biggest challenges you see customers facing?
The majority of people are going to be users of AI. Very few people can create new models, especially when we talk about Gen AI. A few more will be able to tune them. So the question is: how do you query that? And this is where the inference engine comes into place.
We’ve seen a significant evolution in hybrid cloud technology. We are coming from a world where computation was very hard, availability of computers was difficult. Today we are seeing a little bit of that again because of GPUs and accelerators.
But the reality is that computation, thanks to things like Kubernetes and OpenShift, is very easy. So the difficulty is to move and manage those workloads and take them closer to where the data is. This is where the inference server is being able to run everywhere.
When you are running a factory, time can be critical. The closer the inference is to the data, the closer it is to the context, the better the results are.
Also, because of privacy and sovereignty, moving data is becoming a bit more restrictive in a way. The data should be closer to the people that own the data and then move the computation.
This is where the combination of OpenShift and vLLM comes in. How do you get the inference server and how do you manage it at scale closer to where the data is?
This is the way you interact with your models, interact with your hardware and your data. Our belief is that it’s going to be running everywhere and anywhere.
How does adopting open source technologies in a hybrid cloud model accelerate enterprise transformation, especially when it comes to AI and data-driven applications?
Open source is critical and is a core belief of everything we do.
AI without open source is really dangerous and complicated.
You think about Gen AI today, we don’t fully understand how it works. The way Gen AI is created doesn’t come from a theoretical background where you explore all the space. It comes from an empirical background.
We’ve done it by trial and error. We know it works, but nobody truly understands how. So if we don’t do it in the open, then things like hallucinations, bias and other side effects come in.
This is where the community has to work together. Making it available to everybody means everybody can create the benefits.
When it comes to open source and hybrid cloud, we’ve seen where closed source has put people in situations where they are in a corner about using the software or not.
With open source, you have full control and full transparency.
Our business model is that we offer everything that we have. Also, because we are fully-distributed, the talent that supports Red Hat products understands that Red Hat products are everywhere.
We are not constrained by nation or location. I like to believe that this is also something that we are trying to protect, because so much innovation comes from everybody being able to contribute.
Open source lowers the barrier to access and makes it easier for people to contribute with their talent — and make it evolve.
What trends are you seeing in how enterprises are architecting their hybrid cloud environments? How is Red Hat supporting these new requirements?
In terms of hybrid cloud, I think there is a resurgence of what it means.
There was a trend about everything going into hyperscalers, in a way where companies were fully committed to go all into hyperscalers or the cloud.
Now there is a pause and everybody’s putting their brakes on, at least in EMEA, and rethinking what the strategy is.
That was starting to happen because of AI. Some of the strategies that people have put together about going into the cloud didn't align with AI because of data — you have to think about where to put it.
The second one is sovereignty. Sovereignty is what is driving this.
We’ve seen a few cases. There was a bank in the Netherlands that collapsed completely because of the restrictions that were introduced because of the war in Ukraine. Everything went down for geopolitical reasons. That was a wake-up call to many other people to rethink how we do this.
We’ve seen companies making unilateral decisions about how they sell or don’t sell their software. That’s creating massive problems and risks. The risk profile has changed.
We haven’t changed the strategy. What we are seeing is that everybody’s coming to us and asking us the same questions because they can see we’ve been consistent with it. The strategy that we’ve been pursuing is very well aligned with the current geopolitical and technology landscape, which is having the same approach to be able to run in any cloud.
In summary, we try to have a consistent portfolio and way we offer things. In a way, we are a buffer between open source and the innovation that is happening there and our customers.
When we say we are enterprise-ready, we make it solid, but also we make it as easy and consistent as we can for our customers, taking into account that the open source world moves really, really fast.
What are Red Hat’s key strategies for ensuring security, compliance and reliability in hybrid cloud environments, especially in regulated industries?
We try to support all of them. It’s one of the things that I do from the CTO office, make sure that we are proactive about new regulations.
We can cover NIS2 and worked for 18 months to be ready for DORA so we could offer our customers support for DORA if the regulation came to them.
We worked with one of the European banks to make sure that we could provide everything that they needed to answer the questions for the regulator.
The AI Act in Europe is also something we’re working very closely on, then the Cyber Resilience Act being another one.
We work very closely with the regulators so we have an understanding of the new compliance technologies. This is one of the key things that we bring.
Looking ahead, what investments or innovations is Red Hat prioritising to help organisations future-proof their hybrid cloud environments — whether for AI, edge or other emerging technologies?
When we announced the new version of our Linux operating system, RHEL 10, one of the things we introduced was post-quantum computing encryption. We are preparing our customers, who are asking when we expect traditional encryption to be broken with quantum computing?
Quantum computing is very hard to predict.
Sustainability is something else that we work very closely on. We have made announcements on our work in in-vehicle operating systems that have achieved functional safety certifications.
My team, for example, is doing research for a project in Germany where we’re working with BMW. And with a few customers like Siemens we’re doing the same thing that we do for cars but for trains.
We have a very close relationship with IBM Research. We have a lot of collaborations going around AI and post-quantum computing. This is an area it’s been working on for a long time, so we work very closely with them to develop these new post-quantum cryptography libraries.
