Two key announcements made today at Red Hat Summit show that the really big companies are starting to embrace open source to drive hybrid cloud adoption and spur innovation.
IBM
IBM and Red Hat have collaborated to accelerate hybrid cloud adoption. The companies have expanded their long-standing partnership to target the cloud sector from the combined power of the companies’ technologies in both private and public clouds.
Today, 90% of Fortune 100 companies and more than 100 billion mission-critical transactions per day run on IBM systems. Meanwhile, Red Hat has become the leading Linux platform for the enterprise and one of the primary catalysts fueling Kubernetes adoption for global IT organisations.
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The agreement builds on IBM’s recent move to re-engineer its entire software portfolio with containers, including WebSphere, MQ Series and Db2.
Container technologies are fast becoming a safe and reliable way to move applications across multiple IT footprints, from existing data centres to the public cloud and vice versa. IBM’s shift to containerised software combined with Red Hat’s range of solutions will help clear the pathway for enterprises to adopt hybrid cloud computing.
Containers are a strategic necessity for enterprise business. They “need an easy way to move applications from place to place, the agility to meet increasing demands,” explained Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of IBM Hybrid Cloud, at Red Hat Summit.
This agreement will allow those enterprise customers to maximise existing technology investments and move them more easily to the hybrid cloud with IBM Cloud Private and Red Hat OpenShift – the enterprise Kubernetes platform – serving as the common foundation.
It will also allow enterprise customers to build and deploy containerised applications on one single, integrated container platform – with IBM Cloud Private providing a single view of all enterprise data.
“With IBM’s recent move to containerise its middleware, today’s landmark partnership between IBM and Red Hat provides customers with more choice and flexibility,” said Krishna. “Our common vision for hybrid cloud using container architectures allows millions of enterprises – from banks, to airlines, to government organisations – to access leading technology from both companies without having to choose between public and private cloud.”
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Finally, the deal will mean that developers – who are playing an increasingly important role in enterprise operations – to design, modernise and deploy new applications more quickly, while taking advantage of IBM’s cloud-based services such as artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain.
“Today’s enterprises need a succinct roadmap for digital transformation, as well as confidence in deployment consistency across every IT footprint,” said Cormier. “By extending our long-standing collaboration with IBM, we’re bringing together two leading enterprise application platforms in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and IBM Cloud Private, and adding the power of IBM’s software and cloud solutions.”
Microsoft
Microsoft and Red Hat have expanded their partnership around hybrid cloud, container management and developer productivity.
With this collaboration, the companies will introduce the first jointly managed OpenShift offering in the public cloud, combining the power of Red Hat OpenShift and Azure – Microsoft’s public cloud.
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“Today, we’re combining both companies’ leadership in Kubernetes, hybrid cloud and enterprise operating systems to simplify the complex process of container management, with an industry-first solution on Azure,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud and Enterprise Group, Microsoft.
Gartner predicts that by 2020 more than 50% of global organisations will be running containerised applications in production, up from less than 20% today.
With organisations turning to containerised applications and Kubernetes to drive digital transformation and help address customer, competitive, and market demands, they need solutions to easily orchestrate and manage these applications, across the public cloud and on-premises.
“Very few organisations are able to fully silo their IT operations into a solely on-premises or public cloud footprint; instead, it’s a hybrid mixture of these environments that presents a path towards digital transformation,” said Cormier. This will allow the enterprise to more easily harness innovation across the hybrid cloud without sacrificing production stability.
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In addition to being a fully managed service, the offering will improve the essential role of enterprise developers.
It will allow developers the flexibility to freely move applications between on-premises environments and Azure using OpenShift, which offers a consistent container platform across the hybrid cloud.
They will also benefit from improved speed – with faster connections, and enhanced security – and productivity – with access to Azure services like Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Machine Learning and Azure SQL DB.
Red Hat OpenShift on Azure is anticipated to be available in preview in the coming months.
Information Age will be at Red Hat Summit all week, covering all the latest news and trends surrounding open source and digital transformation for the enterprise
