Technically Speaking with Chris Wright
Jun 3, 2026 · 30 min · 11 segments
Go behind the scenes of Red Hat's internal innovation engine to discover how we evaluate emerging open source tech and choose exactly where to place our next major technology bets. In this episode of…
Chris WrightHost
So Steve, traditionally, emerging technology worlds, research worlds, think about that three, five-year horizon.
We've always pulled it back to be more like 18 months plus because of the speed of innovation and open source.
How do you think about emerging technologies and what's coming in a space where there's new things every day?
I often joke about the fact that with generative AI, it feels like we're on a treadmill and every week someone's increasing the speed, right? So our group is a pathfinding group at Red Hat so that we try to identify what's coming down the road and then align Red Hat to be ready for it when it arrives.
And So I have teams of researchers and emerging technology software engineers or machine learning engineers.
And we spend a lot of our time identifying where the right open source innovation is happening and which open source projects.
We know lightning has struck multiple times with him having big ideas and then being big impactful engineers.
So we have a couple of strategic university partnerships where we're engaged with specific researchers to get us that insight really early around research.
And then once we've got something, we develop prototypes around it and work with our product engineering teams and our product management functions to calibrate those prototypes so that they're ready to be used in the way our customers want to use them.
Sort of following the innovation and then mapping that to the enterprise world where real users need to meet this technology and put it into production.
You know, you start with this lump of clay and then you kind of shape it into something that our customers are able to consume, you know.
So Steve, traditionally, emerging technology worlds, research worlds, think about that three, five-year horizon.
We've always pulled it back to be more like 18 months plus because of the speed of innovation and open source.
How do you think about emerging technologies and what's coming in a space where there's new things every day?
I often joke about the fact that with generative AI, it feels like we're on a treadmill and every week someone's increasing the speed, right? So our group is a pathfinding group at Red Hat so that we try to identify what's coming down the road and then align Red Hat to be ready for it when it arrives.
And So I have teams of researchers and emerging technology software engineers or machine learning engineers.
And we spend a lot of our time identifying where the right open source innovation is happening and which open source projects.
We know lightning has struck multiple times with him having big ideas and then being big impactful engineers.
So we have a couple of strategic university partnerships where we're engaged with specific researchers to get us that insight really early around research.
And then once we've got something, we develop prototypes around it and work with our product engineering teams and our product management functions to calibrate those prototypes so that they're ready to be used in the way our customers want to use them.
Sort of following the innovation and then mapping that to the enterprise world where real users need to meet this technology and put it into production.
You know, you start with this lump of clay and then you kind of shape it into something that our customers are able to consume, you know.
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