IBM and Red Hat join forces to accelerate hybrid cloud adoption

At the Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, CA, IBM and Red Hat Inc. announced on May 8 a major expansion to their long-standing relationship, which will enable IBM and Red Hat customers to benefit from the combined power of both companies’ technologies in private and public clouds.

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 centers to the public cloud and vice versa. Going hand-in-hand with IBM’s shift to containerized software, is Red Hat’s expansive portfolio of enterprise-grade, cloud-native, and hybrid cloud infrastructure solutions, which, when combined, provide a clear pathway for enterprises to adopt hybrid cloud computing.

“Today’s enterprises need a succinct roadmap for digital transformation as well as confidence in deployment consistency across every IT footprint,” said Paul Cormier, president, products and technologies for Red Hat. “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. Together, we’re providing customers with a supported, consistent offering across their computing environments.”

As part of the agreement, IBM will extend its private cloud platforms (IBM Cloud Private and IBM Cloud Private for Data) and its middleware offerings to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as Red Hat Certified Containers. Customers can benefit from the speed and simplicity of the IBM Cloud Private self-service catalogue, deployment engine and operational management on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform across all footprints of the hybrid cloud including the IBM public cloud.

The announcement builds on two decades of partnership between IBM and Red Hat, which are two of the world’s biggest open source companies. This extended collaboration is already available to customers, as organizations with eligible Red Hat subscriptions can currently use their Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform subscriptions on IBM Cloud via the Red Hat Cloud Access solution. The companies will also partner to provide joint consultancy and implementation services through the IBM Garage and Red Hat Consulting and the solution will be supported by world-class IBM Technology support services and Red Hat Services. Today’s news parallels a joint development plan designed to accelerate the availability of key pieces of Red Hat’s portfolio on IBM Power Systems. Additionally, IBM, in collaboration with Red Hat, also announced that IBM PowerAI is now available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Today, 90 percent 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 organizations.

“With IBM’s recent move to containerize its middleware, today’s landmark partnership between IBM and Red Hat provides customers with more choice and flexibility,” said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president, IBM Hybrid Cloud. “Our common vision for hybrid cloud using container architectures allows millions of enterprises – from banks, to airlines, to government organizations – to access leading technology from both companies without having to choose between public and private cloud.”

Source: IBM