IBM Redhat and the possible future of Hybrid Cloud

IBM Redhat

The aggressive Public Cloud Market and intensive price competition with the likes of AWS, Microsoft and Google, urged many traditional vendors such as IBM, Cisco, Redhat, VMWare, and others to start offering customers with public-cloud-like capabilities on premises that integrate with their hosted infrastructure aka Hybrid Cloud offering. Several Cloud platforms and orchestration technologies such as OpenStack, Bluemix, Cloud Foundry, SDDC, etc. were explored in building this hybrid cloud model.

This scene however changed drastically as Enterprises started focusing on developing Cloud native applications built on microservices and containers. Containerization gave enterprises the ability to run applications without cloud lock-in, across multiple public clouds as well as private and on-premises infrastructure.

Kubernetes (K8) became the defacto standard for orchestrating such containerized workloads across all major Cloud providers. In accordance with these trends, IBM replaced their existing Bluemix Private cloud with Kubernetes based IBM Cloud Private (ICP) offering to grab the evolving space.
Redhat made some early inroads in this space by offering a Kubernetes based “extensible container application platform” a.k.an OpenShift that supported multiple public clouds as well as private and on-premise infrastructure. Redhat wanted OpenShift to become the standard platform for enterprise containers, similar to their flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and hence struck several partnerships in the recent past to expand their reach.

Partnership with Microsoft to bring OpenShift on Azure cloud as a Managed service, with full Microsoft oversight

Partnership with IBM to offer IBM Cloud Private (ICP) on OpenShiftNow with IBM’s $34B acquisition of Redhat to play catch-up in the cloud industry, I expect the following possible shift in strategies from IBM

IBM may standardize the matured platform, Openshift vs. ICP for hybrid Cloud management
Rebrand IBM Cloud Private with OpenShift and continue to support Cloudfountry for higher interoperability

Cross-sell Openshift augmented with IBM Middleware and Watson APIs to 600+ existing Openshift customers

Possibly discard the offering to deliver Openshift on Azure as a Managed service with Microsoft
Overlay IBM Cloud professional services to extend the reach of Openshift with EnterprisesThe Redhat deal leaves the Street weighing who’s up next for acquisition. After all, it is an ever-evolving Cloud market and one could expect anything.

An interesting Cloud evolution is surely underway !!!