IBM’s Clayton Talks Hybrid Cloud Strategy, $1 Billion Investment
… an already embedded 109-year-old company? IBM just had to make sure its answer to hybrid cloud would meet its (and clients’) exacting standards and requirements. That’s why Big Blue has only emphasized hybrid cloud over the last six months or so.
“Hybrid cloud has been around as a term but, I would say, not really as practical reality,” Clayton said. “You could make an architectural choice to run some of your things in public cloud and some of your things in your on-premises data center, but you had to write both of them differently and separate streams of work to run the same application in both places.”
Conversely, he explained, when IBM says “hybrid cloud,” “you write it once and deploy with click of a button into any of those environments — mainframe, on-premises, public. It’s really a different and architectural feat to do that securely.”
Yet thanks to the Red Hat acquisition, “it’s really real today,” Clayton said.
What Makes IBM’s Hybrid Cloud Different?
For IBM, the biggest hybrid cloud differentiator had to happen on the security level. Again, the company largely works with regulated industries. It therefore cannot compromise or slack on any aspect of security.
“We’ve really invested there in a big way,” Clayton said. “We’re one of the only hybrid cloud companies that offers the level of encryption and security that we do.”
Thus, Big Blue built its hybrid cloud around the U.S. government’s Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2 Level 4 standard. Level 4 ranks as the highest level of security.
“It’s the super-secure module distributed in all our hybrid cloud infrastructure…around the world,” Clayton said. “We’re really the only ones that have done that to that level. It’s a specific industry standard in security and encryption, and it sets us apart from our competitors.”
Flexibility presents another main difference with IBM’s hybrid cloud thanks to Red Hat’s OpenShift services. Organizations may build an application once and run an application from anywhere – mainframe, private, hybrid or public cloud – using OpenShift.
Channel partners will prove integral to IBM’s hybrid cloud implementations. To that end, they can expect a range of support.
“We’re really trying to help them with enablement, migrations, technical resources and skills, architectural reviews, running pilots, investing in helping them understand the security dimensions, regulatory, and we will listen and learn,” Clayton said. “We’re huge believers in enabling and training our partners and making sure they have all the resources they need.”
‘Make Money Right Now’
Even though IBM’s hybrid cloud strategy remains in development and rollout, there are a couple of key areas where the company is facilitating partner cloud revenue now. The first is through the Red Hat Marketplace, which IBM debuted last month.
“We don’t only want our partners to help us tell the hybrid cloud story, we genuinely want to help them make money right now,” Clayton said.
The portal features more than …