Modernizing the enterprise: How virtualization trailblazers are building the future with Red Hat OpenShift

Enterprise IT continues to undergo a massive structural shift. Escalating licensing costs, shifting cloud economics, and the urgent mandate to deploy AI-driven workloads are forcing platform leaders to fundamentally rethink their infrastructure strategies. To remain viable, businesses need forward-looking vision and the ability to bring that vision to fruition. 

Red Hat OpenShift is where strategic vision meets enterprise execution.

The path forward starts with Red Hat OpenShift

Red Hat OpenShift helps organizations connect today's operational requirements with tomorrow's strategic goals. Marking a major milestone at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2026, Red Hat is celebrating the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift 5, bringing enhanced scalability and unified application management across containers, virtual machines (VMs), and AI workloads. We believe that industry analyst evaluations reinforces this momentum. Red Hat is recognized as a Leader in 3 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ reports: 

• The 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Container Management 
• The 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Native Application Platforms 
• The 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Server Virtualization Platforms 

As part of the broader Red Hat OpenShift platform, we are recognized by Gartner for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization for vision and execution. It lets customers run their current VMs while providing a modern platform for future business needs. This validates that container-native virtualization is no longer just an alternative; it’s the benchmark to strive for in modern enterprise platforms.

Real-world pioneers are bridging VMs and cloud-native infrastructure

Leaders execute well against their current vision and are well positioned for tomorrow. By deploying OpenShift Virtualization, organizations across industries like space exploration, global finance, telecommunications, manufacturing, and higher education are landing their traditional VMs onto a modern platform. These teams are doing far more than mitigating near-term cost pressures; they’re actively establishing the operational, architectural, and security foundations needed for the next generations of their businesses.

Space exploration: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a leading research and development center dedicated to Earth science and robotic space exploration of the universe. JPL selected Red Hat OpenShift, with its built-in OpenShift Virtualization capability, to support a sophisticated, high-performance environment. The team used Red Hat’s migration toolkit for virtualization to smoothly transfer 2,400 VMs to OpenShift Virtualization, matching the functionality of the previous environment at a significantly lower cost. JPL is set to benefit from annual cost reductions and now has a reliable, modern platform that supports its daily operations. By updating its enterprise infrastructure with automated workflows, JPL has also simplified and accelerated its deployment cycles.

Banking and financial services: Alior Bank

Financial services groups face stringent regulatory requirements, strict SLA demands, and pressure to optimize total cost of ownership (TCO). One of Central Europe's leading financial institutions, Alior Bank, is on track to slash its existing virtualization costs by 60% and achieve a full return on investment (ROI) in just 2 ½ years because it selected OpenShift Virtualization as its modern virtualization platform and strategically partnered with Hitachi Vantara. The bank used Hitachi Vantara’s Container Storage Interface (CSI) and the migration toolkit for virtualization, taking advantage of the storage offload capability to warm-migrate and validate highly demanding, resource-intensive workloads quickly, safely, and with minimal impact on active production environments. Ultimately, Alior was able to migrate thousands of workloads in just 9 months. With Red Hat OpenShift, Alior Bank has broken free of traditional constraints and positioned itself for future success with containers, microservices, and AI-driven applications. 

Industrial manufacturing and edge scale: Gates Corporation with Netlabs

In partnership with Red Hat Specialized Partner Netlabs, global manufacturer Gates Corporation executed a comprehensive infrastructure modernization program, unifying its existing VMs, microservices, and edge AI workloads on 1 Red Hat OpenShift footprint. Consolidating these environments across operations in more than 30 countries freed compute capacity to run real-time, AI-driven quality inspection models right at the manufacturing edge. By standardizing on Red Hat OpenShift to deploy and manage both VMs and containers—and working with Netlabs to migrate more than 1,300 VMs to the new environment—Gates has made its global IT operations more efficient. The company now has 50% more compute capacity, which it can redeploy to run AI workloads, and a scalable foundation for manufacturing leadership for the next 100 years.

Higher education and research: Brigham Young University

Maintaining continuity for university administrative and academic services requires resilient, predictable infrastructure. Brigham Young University (BYU) modernized its virtualized application portfolio on Red Hat OpenShift, using automated node recovery mechanisms to preserve data integrity and maintain application uptime during hardware or physical node outages. With Red Hat, the institute of higher learning migrated 1,500 VMs in just 6 weeks and established a foundation for the future by modernizing its virtualization strategy with OpenShift Virtualization. By combining automated remediation and proactive workload rebalancing, BYU is delivering predictable high availability for its most critical workloads and safeguarding its data integrity.

Healthcare availability: Hospital Diagnóstico

Modernizing critical healthcare systems requires continuous availability and zero disruption to patient care. Hospital Diagnóstico (PDF) in El Salvador modernized its IT infrastructure using OpenShift Virtualization alongside partners ECSSA and Ingram Micro. The transformation dramatically strengthened operational continuity: System outage incidents fell from 10 to 1 per month, while disaster recovery times were reduced from 48 hours to just 12 hours.

Insurance and financial speed: Allianz Turkey

Seeking to accelerate time to market and optimize operational spend, Allianz Turkey migrated core financial and insurance workloads onto Red Hat OpenShift. The move led to significant cost reductions and sped up application deployment times, allowing cross-functional engineering teams to launch new digital features to policyholders faster and with greater agility.

Telecommunications scale: Bharti Airtel

Serving more than 650 million customers across 15 countries, telecommunications leader Bharti Airtel was recognized in the Virtualization category at the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2026. Airtel is using OpenShift Virtualization, a native feature in Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes to modernize its infrastructure, replacing legacy and manual operations with a unified, cloud-native foundation for its digital services, recharge, and billing platforms.

Lowering the barrier to virtualization modernization

Migrating enterprise virtualization is a technical decision and an operational transition that requires planning, budget, and runway. To support organizations navigating this shift, Red Hat is offering 1 year of free Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization subscriptions for eligible migrations. This promotion gives infrastructure teams the time and flexibility to evaluate workload dependencies, migrate existing VMs without dual-licensing penalties, and experience a unified application platform firsthand.

The future is the next generation of Red Hat OpenShift

As these virtualization success stories demonstrate—across geography and industry and business needs—the future of enterprise platform strategy isn't a forced trade-off between VMs and containers. It’s a unified platform that manages both the present and the future with equal operational intent and maturity. That’s the essence of the Red Hat OpenShift application platform: constant evolution to adapt and respond to what enterprises need today as well as tomorrow. Our virtualization customers are bringing the Red Hat OpenShift vision to life, building secure, intelligent, and predictable foundations that will carry them into the future. See why Red Hat was recognized as a Leader for server virtualization platforms, and read our new e-book about 5 more organizations that are modernizing IT as they prepare for the future with Red Hat OpenShift.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Server Virtualization, by Tony Harvey, Daniel Bowers, Paul Delory, Tony Iams, Owen Marino, 14 September 2026. Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Native Application Platforms, Saha Mukul, Coqueiro Alex, Prasanna Lakshmi Narasimha, Watson Richard, 3 Aug. 2026. Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Container Management, By Dennis Smith, Tony Iams, Wataru Katsurashima, Lucas Albuquerque, Carolin Zhou, Bhuvie Chhabra, 2 September 2026. Gartner and Magic Quadrant are trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. The Gartner document is available upon request from Red Hat.