In an era where organizations are accelerating cloud adoption, modernizing legacy environments and preparing for the next wave of AI-driven innovation, success depends on more than technology alone. It requires strong partnerships, aligned teams and a shared commitment to delivering measurable customer outcomes.
In this episode of Frontier Forward: Asia Edition, Marc Havercroft, ISV Lead, Microsoft Asia, sits down with Garry Gray, Head of Cloud and Co-creation, APAC, Red Hat, to discuss how Microsoft and Red Hat have evolved a decade-long partnership into a deeply integrated collaboration focused on customer success. Their conversation explores how technical innovation, go-to-market alignment and a shared vision for hybrid cloud are helping organizations confidently navigate transformation.
Episode 10: Accelerating customer outcomes through hybrid cloud and collaboration
Key takeaways
Building a decade-long partnership focused on customer outcomes:
At the heart of the Microsoft and Red Hat relationship is a shared commitment to delivering measurable business outcomes. Over the past ten years, the partnership has evolved beyond technology integration to encompass strong field alignment, joint go-to-market execution and deep engineering collaboration, enabling both organizations to operate as one team in support of customers.
Helping customers modernize with Azure Red Hat OpenShift:
As organizations move from evaluating cloud technologies to running them in production, Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO) is helping customers modernize with confidence. The fully managed, production-ready platform provides a unified environment for both virtual machines and containers, enabling organizations to modernize at their own pace while continuing to support existing business-critical applications.
Driving transformation through stronger field and sales alignment:
One of the key drivers of momentum has been closer collaboration between Microsoft and Red Hat sales and field teams. By aligning incentives, encouraging joint customer engagement and focusing on shared success, both organizations are creating stronger pathways for customers to modernize, scale and realize value from their cloud investments.
Expanding cloud innovation across Asia:
The discussion highlighted growing customer demand across Asia, supported by continued investment in infrastructure and regional capabilities. Malaysia was cited as a strong example, where Microsoft and Red Hat demonstrated practical solutions for financial services and government organizations, validating how customers can accelerate their cloud journeys while maintaining operational confidence.
Creating deeper customer engagement through executive collaboration:
A standout example of the partnership’s impact was a joint executive briefing in San Francisco that brought together enterprise customers from across APAC alongside leaders from Microsoft and Red Hat. The event strengthened customer relationships, enabled peer-to-peer engagement and reinforced confidence in the partnership’s ability to support long-term transformation goals.
Delivering long-term value through an open and interoperable approach:
As organizations prepare for the next wave of innovation driven by AI and hybrid cloud, flexibility and interoperability are becoming increasingly important. Microsoft and Red Hat share a vision of helping customers build on open platforms, supported by proven technology, aligned partners and a decade-long collaboration focused on helping customers modernize and innovate.
Stay connected
Keep tuning in to Frontier Forward: Asia Edition for more partner stories and insights that showcase how organizations across Asia are accelerating transformation, embracing innovation and delivering meaningful business outcomes through the power of collaboration.
Full transcript:
Disclaimer: This AI-generated transcript may contain errors. Please verify with the original audio or script for accuracy.
Marc Havercroft:
Welcome everybody. My name is Marc Havercroft. I'm joined by a friend and longstanding partner, Garry. Garry, why don't you introduce yourself?
Garry Gray:
Thanks Marc, it's great to be here. So I'm Garry Gray. I'm the Head of Co-creation and Cloud for Red Hat across APAC. My focus very much is making sure that when Red Hat and Microsoft go to market together, we take our technologies and we turn those into real, measurable business outcomes for our customers.
Marc:
And I think, you know, it's gone from just a partnership, I think to a close working relationship. Maybe you can expand on that Garry, what we've done in the last 10 years.
Garry:
I think you're absolutely right, Marc. It's so much more than a partnership or a coexistence. Every year we've strengthened and deepened that partnership, whether it's, you know, both of us continuing to invest in engineering development or our go to market strategies together, we've really just gone from strength to strength.
Marc:
We really understand each other. We've worked closely to make sure that the two organizations are actually looking at the products, but also more importantly, listening to the enterprise customer and building products that meet the needs now and for the future. And I think that's really, really what the 10 years has shown us now. We really do operate as one team. Maybe let's talk about that business and what's happening, Garry.
Garry:
I think the key thing here is that the partnership has got three elements to it. At the core of that partnership is absolutely customer outcomes. What we do when we both partner and we go to market together is, as I said earlier, deliver on those measurable customer outcomes.
But to do that, we've got to bring our sales teams and our go to market together. So that field alignment, we've really got to get our teams to want to collaborate and work together when they go to customers and to go to customers jointly. And I think the other thing that we've got to do is technical depth. And, you know, what's excited me when I look at this partnership over the last decade is, you know, things like RHEL, OpenShift, Ansible, all products that we've built and know and love run natively on Azure. But I think more than that, together we built a fully-managed service and fill what we both know is a real need for customers.
Marc:
When we look at significant growth, that tells us a number of good news stories. Obviously working well together, but also the demand in the market and particularly in Asia for that. I mean, do you have any views on what's creating that momentum as well from your side?
Garry:
I think it's combinations of things, Marc. You know, it's probably a convergence of what is clearly a mature technology now. You know, customers were evaluating containers and clouds in the past and what they were doing two or three years ago, and customers have got confidence around those technologies and therefore they're no longer kind of evaluating, but they've actually moved to deploying and to actually running those environments and those technologies.
I think the other one, and you touched on a little bit before, you know, we've really got our sales teams and our field teams together and they're so much more aligned than they've ever been, you know, and they're really wanting to collaborate and to work together for the betterment of the customer to deliver those solutions that the customers need to take their businesses to the next level.
Marc:
Let's kind of zoom in on Azure Red Hat OpenShift, right? The demand on that has been increasing weekly, daily, etc.
Garry:
OpenShift from Red Hat and Azure puts it into, as I said earlier, a fully-managed service for customers. Customers have now got confidence around those technologies and they can see that as a solution, not only is it fully-managed, but it's actually production-ready. It has in it features like OpenShift virtualization, which means that customers are now in a position to leverage that technology or those technologies, that platform, to get off their legacy virtualization platforms to actually run VMs and containers together in a single unified architecture.
And more importantly, not only run it, but actually from that environment, be able to kind of, you know, continue to migrate legacy applications as they need to into those new worlds, but also continue to operate those legacy applications that are maybe never going to move to those, that kind of container environment. So, you know, they can meet their immediate needs, but also look at their future needs in that environment.
Marc:
Let's look at Asia. We've been able to match and put that investment into some of the infrastructure to make sure that we can help you meet that demand of the customers as well. Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, for example. I know Malaysia was a particular highlight to us. Do you want to just kind of touch on a bit more of the highlights of Malaysia to you?
Garry:
The highlight for me was us not only being on stage together, but actually being able to demonstrate that we've got, a clear solution that works for that financial sector, for the government sector, that it was a lot more than simply a product launch. It was a validation that there are solutions that those Malaysian customers can take advantage of and can actually accelerate their Cloud journey with you, with us, and also, continue to operate and run their businesses, with confidence.
Marc:
Those kinds of responses tell us everything from the community of customers that we have. Another one of the many things I'm loving about you guys is to help you driving, in the region, driving people to Cloud. And I know you've made some significant, strategic kind of focuses around that. Can you tell us a little bit more around that?
Garry:
First and foremost, Red Hat's obviously focused on hybrid Cloud. You know, at the beginning of this year, we made some kind of structural changes to our organization. We changed some incentives so that our sellers were awarded for kind of meeting the customers where they are. And obviously for helping our customers adopt Red Hat services or Red Hat technologies on Azure.
Those changes mean that now our teams are really incentivized to collaborate with Microsoft and drive that modernization journey for those customers. Our sales teams and our field teams are motivated to want to work together to help those customers, whether they're modernizing, whether they're scaling, but leveraging in both the Azure technology and the Red Hat technologies.
Marc:
I think over the years, the teams have worked well together, but, you know, to have that kind of strategic alignment, even reward alignment as well, we spent a lot of time talking to the end customer and I think that gives them a real level of comfort that this is for the long term.
Garry:
I think the standout was the joint executive briefing in San Francisco bringing together some key customers across the APAC enterprise, along with, leaders in your organization, in our organization, bringing them together in the US to actually engage directly with one another. I think that was a real game changer for our partnership.
In fact, I just, I got off a call, not more than about an hour ago with my boss, talking about how we want to scale that this year. I think for me, that when the customers want to come to an event like that with us and want to participate in an event like that, I think that in itself speaks volumes about the journey that we've been on as partners, but it also demonstrates back to those customers that we're there with them, that we want to do those things together, and that it's much more than just two vendor organizations kind of talking about platitudes or talking about the things we can do. It's actually about bringing them together and showing them what we can do together.
Marc:
What was really pleasing is that both of our organizations, having the customer in the room and others, were able to look at the outcomes that the companies wanted, right? I think at the end of the day, what the enterprise really cares about is business outcomes. And I think both of our teams took away so much from that, as well as the end customers as well.
Garry:
You know, I mean, it's not all about the customers. We've got partners that deliver for you and deliver for me. Strong technical enablement, continuing to engineer together. I think that's critical to our partnership. The quality and the quantity of our joint go to market activities this year, from mine, it's just been truly impressive and long may that live or continue.
Marc:
Be rude of me not to mention a certain award our ANZ business got then as well, right? I think, really, really happy to get that Cloud Accelerator Award. Can you tell us a bit more about the award and kind of what it meant to you guys as well?
Garry:
Well, let me say firstly, it was incredibly well-deserved and whilst that was one market, in ANZ, I think it's representational of what we've really done as partners across the broader region. It's a testament of the Microsoft ANZ team's dedication in the past year. They've been exceptional. They've been outstanding. They have aligned themselves with our field teams and really got in there to help customers.
That Cloud Accelerator award simply recognizes what I'm going to describe as a truly deeply integrated partnership, right? It's not about just the commercial transactions. It's about so much more than that. It's about delivering those outcomes. It's about wanting to do it again and again.
Marc:
Look, these are two big companies, but like everything, sometimes it comes down to the people involved in the partnership. And I know something on your side of things, you've been working a lot on the marketplace co-creation and been hugely successful in that. And, we're really appreciative of your work in that. But I know you kind of stepped into this beast of a partnership this year as well, which is something to step into. Tell me, how have you found this year?
Garry:
I was in our business driving the marketplace practice along with a cocreation practice for, a couple of years prior to this. So to me, this is probably a logical next step to step out of simply marketplace into a broader Cloud along with co-creation. And obviously Microsoft is one of those vital strategic relationships for us in the APAC region.
So kind of stepping from marketplace into that broader Cloud relationship with Microsoft for me has been a fantastic opportunity. It's a testament to both of our organizations over the last 10 years. I certainly inherited an incredible foundation. The two teams, I think are really mature teams. Whilst people come and go in them, at the core, is this collaborative kind of energetic, high-energy, kind of focused team. And as I said, we're building a momentum that is just going from strength to strength to strength.
So we're just rolling into the last seven months of me being in this role, I just see the partnership strengthening and heading to that next level. It's a great partnership. It's a great team. It's not one team. It's two teams coming together or two organizations coming together as one team. And it's just exciting to watch and be a part of.
Marc:
And I think one of the things that we do really well, and I think you bring a lot to this, is bringing simplicity and I think you bring a lot to this, is bringing simplicity to the conversation for the customer and the teams.
I think that's a genuine component of our success this year. And I think it's a great foundation for next year without a shadow of a doubt, Garry. As we kind of wrap this up, I think we'll have the pleasure of some enterprise leaders, CIOs, et cetera, listening to us. What's any message that you would give them, Garry?
Garry:
My message to the enterprise organizations and their leaders is pretty simple, really. To win in the hybrid Cloud world, maybe the AI era, you really need some sort of open, flexible, interoperable platform and partners that are aligned to building that and focused on those customers and their success, I think are critical. I think with Microsoft and with Red Hat, you aren't taking a leap of faith. You're actually joining or partnering with proven, decade-long, winning motion.
Reach out to any of our teams. Come and talk to us. We'll share with you what our customers are already achieving.
Marc:
Yeah, beautifully said, Garry. Thanks for a fantastic conversation, Garry.
Garry:
Thanks, Marc. It's always a pleasure catching up with you and let's make the next 10 great as well.
Marc:
Absolutely.
Garry:
Thanks, mate.