IBM outlines Red Hat strategy as it transforms software to be cloud-native

At IBM’s Investor Briefing on Friday, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty outlined the company’s strategy after acquiring Red Hat last month.

Basically, it boiled down to this: Sell more Red Hat. Sell more IBM services tied to Red Hat.

“There’s plenty of opportunity,” Rometty was quoted as saying. “We’ll incent the entire IBM sales force to sell RED Hat while keeping Red Hat’s independence across all clouds.”

The day before, Big Blue announced that it had transformed its software portfolio to be cloud-native and optimized to run on Red Hat OpenShift.

Enterprises can now build mission-critical applications once and run them on all leading public clouds, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba and IBM Cloud and on private clouds.

In addition, it announced:

Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud: A flexible, fully-managed service of OpenShift on IBM’s public cloud – deployable in one-click with automated resiliency, data compliance, and security – to help enterprises modernize and migrate to a hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxONE: IBM will bring Red Hat OpenShift to their enterprise systems, IBM Z and LinuxONE, which collectively power more than 30 billion transactions a day globally. IBM already supports OpenShift on its Power Systems and Storage.
Consulting and technology services for Red Hat: New IBM services delivered by one of the world’s largest teams of Red Hat certified-consultants and more than 80,000 cloud application services practitioners to help clients advise, move, build, and manage their workloads to cloud environments.

“Red Hat is unlocking innovation with Linux-based technologies, including containers and Kubernetes, which have become the fundamental building blocks of hybrid cloud environments,” Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat’s president and CEO said in a statement.

“This open hybrid cloud foundation is what enables the vision of any app, anywhere, anytime. Combined with IBM’s strong industry expertise and supported by a vast ecosystem of passionate developers and partners, customers can create modern apps with the technologies of their choice and the flexibility to deploy in the best environment for the app – whether that is on-premises or across multiple public clouds.”