IBM and Red Hat Inc. today announced a major
expansion to their long-standing relationship, which will enable IBM and
Red Hat customers to benefit from the combined power of both companies'
technologies in private and public clouds.
The agreement builds on IBM's recent move to
re-engineer its entire software portfolio with containers, including
WebSphere, MQ Series and Db2. Container technologies are fast becoming a
safe and reliable way to move applications across multiple IT
footprints, from existing data centers to the public cloud and vice
versa. Going hand-in-hand with IBM's shift to containerized software, is
Red Hat's expansive portfolio of enterprise-grade, cloud-native, and
hybrid cloud infrastructure solutions, which, when combined, provide a
clear pathway for enterprises to adopt hybrid cloud computing.
Through the agreement, IBM and Red Hat customers can now:
- Maximize
their existing technology investments and move them more easily to the
hybrid cloud with IBM Cloud Private and Red Hat OpenShift serving as the
common foundation;
- Build
and deploy containerized applications on one single, integrated
container platform IBM Cloud Private providing a single view of all
enterprise data;
- Allow
developers to design, modernize, and deploy new applications more
quickly while taking advantage of IBM's cloud-based services such as
artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain
with IBM Cloud Private on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
As
part of the agreement, IBM will extend its private cloud platforms (IBM
Cloud Private and IBM Cloud Private for Data) and its middleware
offerings to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as Red Hat Certified
Containers. Customers can benefit from the speed and simplicity of the
IBM Cloud Private self-service catalogue, deployment engine and
operational management on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform across
all footprints of the hybrid cloud including the IBM public cloud.
Today's
announcement builds on two decades of partnership between IBM and Red
Hat, which are two of the world's biggest open source companies. This
extended collaboration is already available to customers, as
organizations with eligible Red Hat subscriptions can currently use
their Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform subscriptions on IBM Cloud
via the Red Hat Cloud Access solution.
The companies will also partner to provide joint consultancy and
implementation services through the IBM Garage and Red Hat Consulting
and the solution will be supported by world-class IBM Technology support
services and Red Hat Services. Today's news parallels a joint development plan designed
to accelerate the availability of key pieces of Red Hat's portfolio on
IBM Power Systems. Additionally, IBM, in collaboration with Red Hat,
also announced that IBM PowerAI is now available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Today,
90 percent of Fortune 100 companies and more than 100 billion
mission-critical transactions per day run on IBM systems. Meanwhile, Red
Hat has become the leading Linux platform for the enterprise and one of
the primary catalysts fueling Kubernetes adoption for global IT
organizations.