Ironically Renderman has had global illumination and ray tracing for over ten years.
Having said that, what renderman is and what pixar animation do/use are rather orthogonal. For example pixar made heavy use of Subsurface scattering in the incredibles. Something that was at the time rather time intensive.
The title is a bit misleading as they've been using raytracing for years 1
They were doing GI before, but using an approximate point-based solution. The point-based stuff isn't as accurate but it's very fast and still looks pretty good.
