Red Hat’s 2025 Summit features financial service innovators: Emirates NBD’s virtualization transformation

Red Hat Summit 2025 in Boston concluded in May, where several critical open source technology innovations were showcased with a focus on virtualization, automation, cloud technologies, AI/ML and enterprise security, demonstrating the value of Red Hat for business leaders, IT teams and organizations. 

A journey of collaboration - Red Hat and Emirates NBD

One of the featured events at Red Hat Summit 2025 was the keynote, which included a discussion between Stefanie Chiras, SVP of Partner Ecosystem at Red Hat and Nicholas Grimm, Head of Cloud Compute at Emirates NBD regarding the companies’ long-standing technology collaboration efforts.

Grimm highlighted the strategic collaboration, established in 2016, noting Red Hat's crucial role in building the region's largest private cloud, supporting Emirates NBD's position as a leading financial services provider. He emphasized the extensive use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for all critical business applications, from core banking to real-time streaming.

Modernizing infrastructure with OpenShift Virtualization - early and ongoing success

Driven by rising costs from their existing virtualization provider, Emirates NBD’s wanted to replace their virtualization stack with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to create a unified platform for container and virtual machine (VM) workloads. As Emirates NBD already had familiarity with OpenShift and witnessed its growth to over 35,000 containers to date, trust was a key foundation to the success of this partnership. 

Emirates NBD is migrating an average of 140 machines per night to OpenShift Virtualization, including critical applications like core banking, payment and trading systems and infrastructure applications such as databases. Grimm emphasized that Red Hat OpenShift provides reliability, consistent performance, excellent support and a well-defined technology roadmap, critical components for successful VM migrations. 

Key benefits of this implementation include a unified, modern platform simplifying communication between workload types, consistent management for internal teams, improved infrastructure efficiency and enhanced reliability and resilience. 

Additionally, Emirates NBD plans to take advantage of on-premise GPUs with Red Hat OpenShift AI for gen AI use cases.

Building and maintaining trust

Red Hat has established and maintained the trust essential for a financial institution, a cornerstone of a successful partnership. Trusted operations and technology are paramount for ensuring executional continuity for customers. For Emirates NBD, Red Hat serves as a critical technology partner, providing active support throughout builds, upgrades and knowledge transfer—all while empowering their engineers. Currently, 100% of Emirates NBD's workloads operate in a hybrid cloud environment, with 70% of their applications running on RHEL.

“Trust is a key factor in the operation of any financial institution,” said Grimm. “We need to ensure availability, reliability, performance and stability to support our customers' requirements. We are heavily dependent on our technology partners for this, and Red Hat in our ecosystem is critical to achieving this. Red Hat has been an active partner in our journey to date with incredible support through build, upgrades and beyond.”

Want to learn more?

Watch the YouTube video, Emirates NBD Keynote success story on Virtualization, Nicholas Grimm, Head of Cloud Compute, Emirates NBD, or check out how Red Hat enables success in the financial services sector.