IBM and Red Hat today unveiled a range of new offerings at their Think Digital meeting, all centering on the 5 G edge and AI. This does not come as a surprise that the company is focused on these two fields, considering that both edge and AI are two of the fastest-growing companies in enterprise computing. Virtually every telecom provider is now looking at how best to capitalize on the upcoming 5 G rollouts and most forward-thinking companies are trying to find out how best to prepare for their own needs around this.
As IBM’s recently minted president, Jim Whitehurst, told me ahead of today’s announcement, he believes that IBM (in combination with Red Hat) will give companies a very differentiated service because IBM is not interested in locking these companies into a homogeneous cloud, unlike the big hyper clouds.
“Where IBM is competitively differentiated, it’s about how we’re thinking about supporting clients on a path to what we call the hybrid cloud,” Whitehurst said, who hasn’t done a lot of media interviews since he took on the new position that still involves overseeing Red Hat. “Honestly everybody has hybrid clouds. I wish we were given a more differentiated word. One of the aspects that’s special is how we talk about how you think of an application portfolio that you’re going to have in many ways, by necessity. If you’re a big company, you’re going to have a mainframe running a series of transactional workloads that will possibly sit there for a long time because there’s no great alternative. And there’ll be a collection of applications you want to run in a distributed environment that needs to access the data —down to you running a factory floor and you want to make sure the paint sprayer doesn’t have any faults while it is painting a door.”
He argues that IBM, at its heart, is all about helping businesses think about how to better handle their software, hardware, and services perspective for workloads. “Public clouds are amazing because they present a range of resources to businesses homogeneously,” he said, arguing that IBM is trying to tie all these different parts together.
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He subsequently argued in our discussion that the large public clouds effectively require businesses to fit their workloads into the operation of those clouds. “Public clouds do extraordinary things and they are our great partners but their main business is to create these homogeneous services, at large amounts, and saying ‘if your workloads fit in, we can run it easier, quicker, cheaper, etc.’ And, naturally, they have grown. They added several facilities. For example, on the news side, IBM is introducing new services to simplify business planning, budgeting, and forecasting, as well as new AI-driven tools for building and running automation apps, which can manage routine tasks either autonomously or with the aid of a human counterpart. The organization is also introducing new technologies to simplify call centers.
Conclusion:
Most of the latest Telco edge and hybrid cloud implementations are based on Red Hat technologies but developed by IBM, and neither IBM nor Red Hat could have brought them to fruition in the same way. Whitehurst argued that Red Hat never had the bulk, scope, and skills to pull off any of these ventures.
