Summary
- To IBM's credit, for several years now, it has been working to modernize the organization and its offerings.
- A key part of this has been an emphasis on cloud-centric services, such as its own IBM Cloud, as well as tools and services to migrate existing applications to the cloud.
- Red Hat's OpenShift is an essential part of that cloud-centric strategy.
While it's easy to think that moving software to the cloud is old news, the reality in most businesses these days is very different. Only a tiny fraction of the applications that companies rely on to run their day-to-day operations operate in the cloud or have even been modernized to a cloud-native format.
In fact, at a recent cloud-focused analyst event, IBM (NYSE:IBM) pointed out that just 20% of enterprise applications are running in either a public cloud (such as AWS (NASDAQ:AMZN), Microsoft Azure (NASDAQ:MSFT), Google Cloud Platform (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), etc.) or private cloud. And remember, this is nearly 15 years after cloud computing services first became publicly available with the launch of Amazon's Web Services. It stands to reason, then, that the remaining 80% are old school, legacy applications that are potentially still in need of being updated and "refactored" (or rewritten) to a modern, flexible, cloud-friendly format.
This opportunity is why you see most enterprise-focused software companies still spending a great deal of time and money on tools and technologies to move business software to the cloud. It's also one of the main reasons IBM chose to purchase Red Hat and is starting to leverage that company's cloud-focused offerings. IBM has a very long history with enterprise applications through both its software and services businesses and, arguably, probably has more to do with the enormous base of traditional legacy business applications than any other company in existence.
To IBM's credit, for several years now, it has been working to modernize the organization and its offerings. A key part of this has been an emphasis on cloud-centric services, such as its own IBM Cloud, as well as tools and services to migrate existing applications to the cloud. Red Hat's OpenShift, which is an open source version of a Kubernetes-based container platform (a technology that sits at the heart of most cloud-native applications), is an essential part of that cloud-centric strategy.
Specifically, OpenShift, along with IBM's new CloudPaks, can be used to help modernize legacy applications into a containerized, cloud native form, then deployed either in a private cloud, such as behind the firewall of a company's own on-premise datacenter, in a hosted environment, or in one of several public clouds, including IBM's own cloud offering. What makes the latest announcements most compelling is that OpenShift is widely supported across all the major public cloud platforms, which means that applications that are written or rebuilt to work with OpenShift can be deployed across multiple different cloud environments, including Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, and Alibaba (NYSE:BABA).
