The strategic shift: How Ford and Emirates NBD reduced complexity in virtualization

As enterprises continue to operate in increasingly hybrid environments, the need to balance modern, cloud-native applications with long-standing virtual machine (VM) systems has never been more pressing. For many global organisations, this dual-stack approach results in fragmented operations, siloed teams, and higher costs — a burden often referred to as the “complexity tax.”

Ford Motor Co. and Emirates NBD, two industry leaders in automotive manufacturing and financial services respectively, recently shared how they addressed this challenge by unifying their VM and container environments on a single platform. Their transformation journeys offer a practical roadmap for organisations navigating similar modernization pressures.

A shared challenge: Legacy meets agility

Both companies face substantial operational demands — Ford with its 122-year legacy and thousands of applications, and Emirates NBD with its 24/7 financial ecosystem that relies heavily on regulatory compliance and stability. While both organisations have made significant progress in containerizing modern workloads, many mission-critical systems must remain in VMs due to their architecture, compliance requirements, or vendor dependencies.
The goal, therefore, was not full modernization overnight, but a platform that could host both VMs and containers seamlessly — improving agility while reducing cost and operational complexity.

The unified solution: Red Hat OpenShift with OpenShift Virtualization

Ford and Emirates NBD converged on Red Hat OpenShift, supported by Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, which integrates VM workloads into Kubernetes using the open-source KubeVirt project.
For Emirates NBD, confidence in the platform strengthened once they saw it offering:

1. Interoperability with existing security and CI/CD tools such as Vault and Jenkins

2. Future-readiness, allowing VMs to stay intact until they are ready for modernization

3. Unified management to reduce tool sprawl and simplify overall operations

Lessons from large-scale migration

Both companies highlight that transformation requires not only technical planning but cultural adaptation:

• Modernization is a journey: Once Ford migrated VMs to OpenShift, teams were able to selectively modernize applications to leverage new capabilities such as software-defined networking and improved load balancing.

• Training and expertise matter: Ford overcame internal resistance by providing staff training and certifications, while also engaging external specialists to support the transition.

• Storage is a central challenge: Emirates NBD coordinated closely with storage partners to sync vast amounts of data, enabling the migration of hundreds of VMs per night.

• Automation accelerates scale: Both organisations built self-service automation workflows, enabling users to request migrations while giving teams control over execution windows.

Tangible results

The outcomes were both operational and strategic. Emirates NBD successfully migrated 9,000 VMs in just six months, averaging 140 migrations per night — gaining cost reductions, greater agility, and improved infrastructure efficiency in support of ESG goals.
Ford’s migration across various manufacturing plants was so seamless that operational teams did not notice the cutover. Developers benefited from the ability to provision testing environments on demand instead of relying on constantly running setups.

Future-ready infrastructure

With unified platforms in place, both organisations are now focusing on next-generation capabilities:

• Ford is moving toward autonomous infrastructure, including “plant in a box” deployments and AI-driven self-healing systems.

• Emirates NBD is adopting a “cookie-cutter” approach, using the standardized platform across new markets while leveraging Red Hat’s capabilities for GPU and AI workloads.

Advice for IT leaders

As enterprises continue to seek stable, future-ready, and cost-efficient environments, both leaders offered simple guidance:

• Ali Rey, Emirates NBD: “Don’t think twice. Just jump straight into it.”

• Sandeep Kulkarni, Ford Motor Co.: “Follow the crawl, walk, and run strategy. Break the transformation into manageable phases, always focusing on business value.”

Ford and Emirates NBD’s experience underscores a growing industry reality: modern enterprise IT requires a single, unified control plane that supports both legacy and future workloads. With Red Hat OpenShift and its integrated virtualization capabilities, both organisations demonstrated that the complexity tax no longer needs to be a cost of doing business.