Red Hat eyes smarter cloud-native AI ahead
Normally a more backroom, back-office, base layer, kernel-centric organisation in our eyes (if not in the view of 99.9% of software application development professionals), Red Hat has put an additional stamp on the AI market this month with a suggestion that preparing for AI adoption is a key driver for cloud strategies today.
The company analysed a set of European-based technology practitioners and found that along with preparing for AI adoption, the drive to deploy cloud in practical functional ways is almost level with a need to adopt cloud-native application development and DevOps.
Most IT managers see advantages in adopting enterprise open source solutions for AI, including predictive and generative, says Red Hat.
Research carried out across 609 IT managers from large businesses (500+ employees) within six countries: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UAE and the UK explored the priorities and challenges for IT managers as they navigate cloud complexity and the opportunities and barriers they face in executing AI strategies.
When asked about the advantages in adopting enterprise open source solutions for AI – including predictive and generative – more than half of UK IT managers surveyed (53%) cited accelerated innovation, alongside cost-efficiency (50%) and trust and transparency (43%).
Cloud as an investment priority
IT managers surveyed across the six countries describe their organisation’s planned approach to investing in cloud technology by 2025. Half are taking a balanced approach, focusing equally on new technologies and enhancements to existing systems, but a quarter have a strong focus on innovation and new technologies.
“Cloud technology continues to unlock significant advantages in scalability, cost efficiency and faster time to market,” said Hans Roth, senior vice president & general manager EMEA, Red Hat. “Yet, this adoption can also drive increased complexity, with many organisations finding themselves slowed down by internal silos, as shown in this latest survey. With the increasing prominence of AI in cloud strategies, we see from this survey that both IT managers and CTOs care about transparency when it comes to AI models: we believe that an open source approach can bring the transparency, modifiability and explainability needed for enterprise-ready generative AI.”
When asked about their ability to take advantage of the growing AI opportunity, just less than half of IT managers surveyed state that their organisation has scalable, flexible and accessible IT platforms but lacks the right skill sets to fully harness AI’s potential.
This compares to a quarter that have the right platforms and feel well-positioned to get the best value from them and a third who are in need of new platforms.
“We see a strong desire from UK businesses to innovate with cloud technologies to stay competitive, while needing to respond to cost pressures and find efficiencies. AI has the potential to help address a range of business demands and we believe an AI-centric future requires greater choice, flexibility and independence across clouds,” said Joanna Hodgson, country manager, UK, Red Hat. “This in turn requires a higher level of collaboration by design so that organisations can work across diverse tools, vendors and clouds to prepare for whatever comes next. The beauty of taking an open source approach to AI is that organisations don’t have to risk rapid innovation alone: they can navigate the unpredictability alongside 70 million contributors and with Red Hat, the confidence that their innovation is backed by enterprise support.”
With generative AI increasingly being explored by enterprises looking to solve existing problems or seize new opportunities, the survey looked into the importance of a range of factors in determining trust in an enterprise model for generative AI.
