IBM Embraces Red Hat OpenShift for Multicloud Era

Less than a month since closing its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, IBM on Thursday announced the transformation of more than 100 products from its software portfolio to be cloud-native and optimized to run on Red Hat OpenShift. A key component of this new capability is IBM Cloud Paks.

IBM Cloud Paks are IBM-certified and containerized software that will provide a common operating model and common set of services, including identity management, security, monitoring and logging, designed to improve visibility and control across clouds through a unified and intuitive dashboard. The basic premise around Cloud Paks is consistency and choice.

IBM’s Arvind Krishna

“IBM is unleashing its software from the data center to fuel the enterprise workload race to the cloud. This will further position IBM as the industry leader in the more than $1 trillion hybrid cloud opportunity,” said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president, cloud and cognitive software at IBM. “We are providing the essential tools enterprises need to make their multiyear journey to cloud on common, open standards that can reach across clouds, across applications and across vendors with Red Hat.”

IBM is making five Cloud Paks available today: Cloud Pack for Data, Cloud Pak for Applications, Cloud Pak for Integration, Cloud Pak for Automation and Cloud Pack for Multicloud Management.

The vendor also made additional new announcements including: Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud, Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxOne, and consulting and technology services for Red Hat.

Today’s news outlines IBM’s product strategy, what the company is doing with using Red Hat embedded in IBM products, and reinforcement of its hybrid, multicloud platform strategy – also referred to as chapter two – and its mission to help clients and business partners speed their hybrid cloud adoption. IBM estimates that only about 20% of customers are making a move to hybrid cloud so far.

Speaking at IBM Think 2019 earlier this year, IBM chairman, president and CEO Ginni Rometti, talked about chapter one in digital transformation, or digital reinvention, as characterized by digital, AI, experimentation and customer-facing apps. Chapter two, she said, will be enterprise-driven, meaning scaling digital and AI, including hybrid cloud and mission-critical applications.

This opens new doors for IBM partners.

IBM’s Dorothy Copeland

“We see this as a huge opportunity for partners to be able to transform their client workloads with an open and secure approach to cloud,” Dorothy Copeland, global vice president, IBM partner ecosystem programs and business development, told Channel Futures.

Many IBM partners already are using the technology in the Cloud Pak but might need training on managing and setting up the OpenShift environment. IBM is inviting partners to learn more about the new products via virtual, online or face-to-face training. They can also access enablement materials on IBM’s Red Hat resources page on PartnerWorld, as well is in the IBM-Red Hat Run book on Seismic.

As for Red Hat partners, Copeland sees the new products as a great opportunity to start to develop their IBM practice, as the vendor continues on its path to containerize its middleware portfolio on a common Kubernetes platform — now Red Hat OpenShift.

“We’ve been very open with Red Hat partners, asking them to join PartnerWorld. We have a lot of resources there, including signing up for Partner Connect, where they can connect with IBM partners with other skill sets and vice versa,” said Copeland.

IBM also recently launched a competency matching program called Fast Start for Red Hat partners, enabling those with accreditations to qualify for IBM cloud competencies.