Red Hat Summit 2026 | Hemant Mohan, AWS & Bria Huber, Red Hat

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Hemant Mohan

Strategic Partnerships

AWS

Bria Huber

Global Cloud Leader

Red Hat

play_circle_outline Red Hat launch partner for AWS European Sovereign Cloud addressing data sovereignty compliance

play_circle_outline Red Hat acts as connective tissue between IBM SaaS (e.g., Maximo) and AWS infrastructure

play_circle_outline Red Hat, AWS Deepen Ties — From RHEL and ROSA to Ansible Automation and Exclusive Red Hat AI on AWS Marketplace

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Hemant Mohan, AWS & Bria Huber, Red Hat

Hemant Mohan

Strategic Partnerships AWS

Bria Huber

Global Cloud Leader Red Hat

In this interview from Red Hat Summit 2026, Hemant Mohan, global head of strategic alliances for technology partnerships at Amazon Web Services, and Bria Huber, global cloud leader at Red Hat, join theCUBE's Rob Strechay and Rebecca Knight to discuss how an 18-year partnership is evolving from infrastructure foundations to AI-first enterprise modernization. Mohan traces four distinct phases of the Red Hat-AWS relationship — RHEL becoming native on EC2, containers and ROSA, Ansible automation and now AI — noting that the entire Red Hat AI product suite is excl... Read more

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Why does Red Hat's role as a launch partner for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud for regulated industries in Europe matter, and why is it happening now? add

How does Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) act as the “connective tissue” between IBM and AWS and enable IBM and its customers to run and modernize IBM SaaS and workloads (e.g., Maximo) on AWS? add

How has the partnership between Red Hat and AWS evolved over its 18-year history, and what is its current focus? add

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Hemant Mohan, AWS & Bria Huber, Red Hat

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Rebecca Knight

>> Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cube's live coverage of the Red Hat Summit here at the Georgia World Congress in Atlanta. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I would like to welcome to the stage our next two guests. We have Bria Huber, global cloud leader at Red Hat. Thank you so much for returning-

Bria Huber

>> Thank you. It's always good to be here.

Rebecca Knight

>> Cube veteran. And Hemant Mohan, strategic partnerships at AWS.

Hemant Mohan

>> Hi.

Rebecca Knight

>> Thank you so much. I'm so happy to have you on.

Hemant Mohan

>> Thanks for having me, Rebecca.

Rebecca Knight

>> So I'm going to start with you, Hemant, because AWS has really become one of the most important procurement channels in enterprise software. Talk a little bit about how it's evolved in recent years and where Red Hat fits into that.

Hemant Mohan

>> Great question. Rebecca, we are seeing that AWS Marketplace is becoming the go-to destination for customers to buy enterprise software in the cloud. And the evolution has been phenomenal. You got over 15,000 listings on the AWS marketplace, over 3,500 ISVs who are offering their products on the marketplace for our end customers. Gives them a tremendous choice of third-party products they want to buy. From an evolution perspective, you're also seeing that the category of software that's on the AWS Marketplace is also changing. I remember the early days when sellers were selling security software and going to containers and now agents that are being listed on the AWS Marketplace. So it's an exciting time for the AWS Marketplace and for our customers to procure software.

Bria Huber

>> It's actually been really incredible to see. I talked about this yesterday at the Commercial Partner Advisory Council. It really is this, not necessarily a technology shift, but a strategic sourcing shift. So we're finding that as millennials and gen Zers and as they start to move into these senior roles within procurement and sourcing, they want the same experience that we have at home, right? Two clicks and my Amazon package is on its way. So that has really driven this big shift where they want all of their software to be consolidated through Marketplace.

Rebecca Knight

>> That's really fascinating that it's a generational shift in terms of what they're used to, what they're accustomed to and they want it at work too. It makes a lot of sense. Hemant, from the developer side, you're integrating so many different kinds of tools. What do they let developers do now that they couldn't do before?

Hemant Mohan

>> So this is super exciting because developers are now shifting towards building products without a lot of coding and they want to make that experience as frictionless as possible. So one of the things that we are announcing is the integration of our agentic IDE Kiro with OpenShift depth spaces. And what that does for developers is that they go from writing code from zero, in minutes they are delivering code. And that's the evolution that we are seeing in this space.

Bria Huber

>> I joke, I'm like, "Even I could write code." That's how impressive this technology-

Hemant Mohan

>> Bria, don't say that. You can write code.

Bria Huber

>> I love your confidence in me.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, I want to talk a little bit about inference cost because it is one of these panics that's happening right now in enterprise AI. Talk a little bit about the collaborations between AWS and Red Hat and how they move the needle on that. Bria?

Bria Huber

>> These partnerships are so important because I don't know how many of us could predicted some of these developments, these political economic changes that have really started to impact our customers. And so I think this just lends itself to the foundation that we've built as partners, that we can really come together to solve these challenges for customers in innovative ways, leveraging our co-engineering relationship.

Hemant Mohan

>> Cost of compute is going up and we want to make sure that it is super optimized for customers that are running their AI workloads on AWS. And so we are partnering with Red Hat in a big way, making sure that Red Hat products are optimized to run on AWS Silicon so customers get the price performance benefits of running their compute workloads on AWS with Red Hat.

Rebecca Knight

>> So speaking of price performance, I want to make sure I get this right because it's OpenShift AutoNode on ROSA, which is one of your more technically ambitious announcements. Talk a little bit about what it does in plain terms and how it is saving customers money.

Bria Huber

>> So Hemant can probably talk a little bit more about the impact. What I get very excited about is that this is once again another example of the innovation that happens in open source communities and us bringing that to the enterprise to provide tremendous value. So really it's about Project Carpenter, which allows for lifecycle management across the worker nodes for ROSA. So this helps with optimization, cost savings, insights. Am I missing anything?

Hemant Mohan

>> No, I think you're spot on. I think it takes the guesswork away from customers to figure out how they should be managing their nodes. And we are seeing that customers are almost reporting 20 to 30% cost savings right out of the box with this feature. So we are excited for our customers.

Rebecca Knight

>> Bria, Red Hat is a launch partner for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud for the regulated industries in Europe. Why does this matter from the Red Hat perspective and why now?

Bria Huber

>> That's a great question. I think the why now is a bit of what I just said. There are some dynamics at play that mean that customers, regulators, regulated industries, government agencies really want to have this data sovereignty at varying levels. So for some it is around those digital barriers. For others, it's all the way through to support being in country. As AWS continues to provide this at the enterprise scale for customers, we certainly want to be right there with them. So to have RHEL and OpenShift available so customers can have the compliance and the security and regulations they need, but with the enterprise software they're used to is very important for us as we react to what might come next.

Rebecca Knight

>> And that's really an open question too. Exactly.

Hemant Mohan

>> I would add exactly the core tenant of our partnership has been that we've been working backwards from our customer needs. And so we find, in Europe, in regulated industries, those customers are asking for data sovereignty. They're asking for regions that follow compliance against GDPR and so the availability of RHEL and OpenShift from day one in the European Sovereign Cloud addresses some of those customer needs. It's a big signal for our customers together as a partnership that we are delivering value and listening to our customers and addressing their needs in that context.

Rebecca Knight

>> So it's really resonating in Europe that it's not just some stripped-down offering.

Hemant Mohan

>> That is true.

Rebecca Knight

>> Exactly, exactly. So there's this market dynamic right now, Bria, where customers want choice, but also where they run their virtualized workloads and ROSA lets VMs and containers run side by side managed by the same control plane. Talk a little bit about the customer challenges and why that is so important right now.

Bria Huber

>> I was just having a conversation with a customer who was going through this on the financial institute side and really, for whatever reason may be, customers are in a position now where there is a virtualization modernization project that has been put upon them. And so it's really important, when we look at who we are at our core, the hybrid cloud journey is so important. And the hybrid cloud journey doesn't mean that it is all migration to the cloud. It means that the reality is you're going to have workloads everywhere. So to have OpenShift virtualization be able to run and have the VMs in the containers running side by side is very important. I think the value here is, and it's been GA in ROSA for 18 months I think now, and it is so important for our customers to know that, no matter where they decide to deploy their infrastructure, we've got a tested, tried, true solution so that they can have complete orchestration of their landscape.

Hemant Mohan

>> What I like also about this is that it comes with the migration toolkit. So again, it makes it super easy for customers to look at their VMs, look at their containers, bring them onto in a matter of clicks. And so again, want to make it as frictionless as possible and the ability to run VMs and containers in the same control plane is super powerful for our customers.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, Red Hat really, I mean, you just get this feeling here at the summit that it's really part... It's the centerpiece of this ecosystem here. And I know that it's also the connective tissue between IBM software portfolio and AWS infrastructure. So can you walk us through a little bit about what that looks like and feels like from the customer side?

Hemant Mohan

>> Great question. It truly is the connective tissue between IBM and AWS. So let me just take IBM as an example. IBM has over 40 SaaS listings that run natively on AWS and available on the AWS Marketplace. IBM runs those SaaS on top of ROSA. And so again, the management of the software including the container orchestration is something that IBM does using ROSA. When it comes to the customer side, it's the same thing. The customer has the option of running IBM workloads on AWS, either self-managing OpenShift on AWS or again, managing on top of ROSA. What this means is that if I'm a IBM customer, I'm looking to modernize my IBM workloads on AWS, I now have the same frictionless experience to take my IBM software from where it is today in through the modernized world without any gotchas or surprises. A great example is with Maximo. Maximo, it's one of the leading asset performance management tools. One of the earlier versions of Maximo 7.6 is going end of life. So we have these customers now who want to migrate their IBM Maximo workloads onto AWS and modernize them. Then again, OpenShift becomes that connective tissue so that them migrating those workloads and modernizing those workloads becomes so easy. So we are seeing that in the market and we're super excited about that.

Rebecca Knight

>> If you were to fast-forward a few years from now, where do you both think that the next chapter of the ROSA Red Hat AWS partnership is going? Bria, I'm going to start with you.

Bria Huber

>> That's an exciting question because one of the things especially that this virtualization opportunity has really shown us is the power and the necessity of the entire ecosystem. So what I see moving forward, and this plugs into AWS Marketplace as well, is really these multiple partners coming together to solve customer challenges, meeting in the marketplace, landing on and working with and integrating with ROSA. It's really powerful for customers to get that, not just the technology control and that openness to choose the partners they want, but then to meet in the marketplace to actually procure. That's what I'm probably most excited.

Hemant Mohan

>> I mean, if I think about this partnership, Rebecca, this partnership is almost two decades old, 18 years. That's a long time, right? And I feel like we've gone through four phases since the beginning of the partnership. The first phase of this partnership was everything around RHEL. That really kicked this partnership off that RHEL became native on EC2. The second phase of this partnership I think was around containers. And you got ROSA and that running natively on AWS. The third phase was Ansible with automation and now I believe we are in the fourth phase with AI. And what's exciting for me with this partnership is that the entire Red Hat AI product suite is exclusively available on the AWS Marketplace. I see the future going in that direction. We'll continue to, again, work backwards from our customers, address their needs, take AI from an experimentation to production and that's where it's headed.

Rebecca Knight

>> So final question for both of you. I'm going to start with you, Hemant. If a CIO is watching this right now and thinking about how to modernize their application platform, what do you recommend as the first conversation they should be having when they return to their team on Monday?

Hemant Mohan

>> I would say ROSA, ROSA, ROSA.

Rebecca Knight

>> How about just call me?

Bria Huber

>> There you go. We'll flash his contact information on the screen.

Rebecca Knight

>> Great.

Bria Huber

>> I think it really is about what is the end goal? What is the end state? Not where you are today and where you feel pressured to go, but ultimately what does nirvana look like? And then let's start to build back from there because the capabilities are coming at a rate that we've never seen. So especially when you look at the communities that are ultimately supported by Red Hat, it is happening so fast that, if you can set yourself up to have an agnostic platform so that you can utilize and integrate all these technologies with the support and compliance that you need, that is my recommendation. So just start with that dream state and let us help you build it.

Rebecca Knight

>> Exactly. And then work back from there. That makes a lot of sense. Hemant, Bria, thank you both so much for coming on the show. Always a pleasure.

Bria Huber

>> Thank you.

Hemant Mohan

>> Thanks for having us, Rebecca.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight. Stay tuned for more of the Cube's live coverage of the Red Hat Summit from Atlanta, Georgia.