As IT leaders and business executives, we're looking beyond the current year to make strategic plans and prepare our organizations for what's next. While AI is, without a doubt, the focus for everyone going into 2026, it's equally important to ensure the underlying technology platforms support your AI adoption strategy and your investment decisions for the future. The choices we make now regarding our technology platforms will directly impact our agility, efficiency, and ability to innovate in the years to come. We're thrilled to see a recent IDC analyst study not only validate but also offer a comprehensive look into the value of an integrated platform approach, providing a great starting point for any organization's future-facing strategy. The IDC paper, The Business Value of Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Solutions, validates that a unified hybrid cloud platform—consisting of a scalable operating system (OS), cloud application development platform, and enterprise-grade automation platform—delivers significant, measurable results and prepares your organization to support your AI adoption strategy. These findings come directly from in-depth interviews with Red Hat customers that have standardized much of their IT operations on our hybrid cloud solutions. Customers achieved: - 74% faster business change execution. - 38% higher development team productivity, translating to a $54.45 million average annual gain per organization. - 60% faster new application development lifecycle. These metrics underscore the importance of choosing a foundational platform that eliminates organizational and technological barriers and boosts efficiency. As one customer noted: “Instead of managing four vendors for different parts of the stack, we work with one.” Another emphasized that Red Hat solutions should be a critical consideration for any innovative, AI-ready strategy. The customer said: “Red Hat solutions give us massive agility. We’ve greatly increased our resilience and ability to scale infrastructure, gaining true elasticity.” Your key considerations for 2026 planning Drawing from the insights in the IDC study, here are a few key areas to focus on as you plan for the coming year: - Standardize on an integrated platform: Building a more security-focused and stable foundation for business-critical workloads across your hybrid cloud environment ensures you have a consistent infrastructure, real-time visibility into system health, and faster incident response to improve application performance and reduce operational risk. - Accelerate your innovation: Choose a platform that empowers your developers to build, test, and deploy code more rapidly and reliably to enable faster release cycles and higher-quality application delivery. - Optimize your resources: Focus on solutions that standardize environments, automate provisioning, and streamline deployment processes across hybrid and multicloud infrastructures to deliver faster responses to business demands, reduce operational bottlenecks, and enable continuous improvement and innovation. - Strengthen your security posture: As your IT environment grows, a unified platform can help you to enforce security policies more effectively, reduce risk exposure, and streamline audit preparation while keeping pace with changing industry regulations. The IDC study provides a clear path forward, showcasing how an integrated platform can help you achieve significant gains in IT infrastructure efficiency and accelerate time to market. I encourage you to read the full paper; it offers a blueprint for how to build a more agile, productive, and cost-effective IT strategy that can propel your organization to success. Resource The adaptable enterprise: Why AI readiness is disruption readiness About the author More like this Sovereignty emerges as the defining cloud challenge for EMEA enterprises Enhance workload security with confidential containers on Azure Red Hat OpenShift Crack the Cloud_Open | Command Line Heroes Edge computing covered and diced | Technically Speaking Browse by channel Automation The latest on IT automation for tech, teams, and environments Artificial intelligence Updates on the platforms that free customers to run AI workloads anywhere Open hybrid cloud Explore how we build a more flexible future with hybrid cloud Security The latest on how we reduce risks across environments and technologies Edge computing Updates on the platforms that simplify operations at the edge Infrastructure The latest on the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform Applications Inside our solutions to the toughest application challenges Virtualization The future of enterprise virtualization for your workloads on-premise or across clouds