IBM goes cloud-native with Red Hat OpenShift

IBM has wasted no time incorporating Red Hat into its portfolio, announcing today that its full software offering has been "transformed... to be cloud-native".

This, the company claims, will allow customers to build mission-critical apps once and then run them on most public clouds, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba and, of course, its own IBM Cloud.

The move comes just three weeks after IBM was given regulatory approval to acquire open source stalwart Red Hat and it's no coincidence that this initiative is "optimised" to run on the OpenShift containerisation platform.

In its cloud-native form, IBM's software will be offered as pre-integrated, containerised modules called IBM Cloud Paks.

The first five of these Paks for Data, for Applications, for Integration, for Automation, and for Multicloud Management are available today. More will be forthcoming, it seems, but no timeframe or number has yet been given.

In addition to Cloud Paks, IBM made three other Red Hat-centred announcements today.

The first is Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud, a "flexible, fully-managed service" that the company claims will "help enterprises modernise and migrate to a hybrid cloud infrastructure".

The second is the news that Red Hat OpenShift is now available for IBM Z and LinuxONE, having previously only been available on Power Systems and Storage.

Finally, there are new consultancy and technology services available from IBM for Red Hat.

Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of cloud and cognitive software at IBM, said: "This will further position IBM as an industry leader in the more than $1 trillion dollar hybrid cloud opportunity.

"We are providing the essential tools we think enterprises need to make their multi-year journey to cloud on common, open standards that can reach across clouds, across applications and across vendors with Red Hat."