With the holidays around the corner, it is a great time to reflect, perform a retrospective on the year that has been, and prioritize our focus areas for the next year. 

With IBM’s focus on hybrid cloud, there is no shortage of opportunity. To provide a good segue into these opportunities and key differentiators for IBM, I’d like to share some interesting findings from a recent IDC White Paper, co-sponsored by IBM and Intel, titled “Cloud-Native Everywhere: Partnering with IBM on the Open Hybrid Cloud.”

IDC estimates worldwide enterprise spend on public cloud infrastructure to surpass that on traditional IT infrastructure by 2022. While public cloud platforms and modern application architectures provide scale and agility, they are not without challenges. Some enterprises lack the skill set and maturity to operate cloud-based and cloud native platforms. Enterprises also find managing heterogeneous technology difficult. 

IBM’s platform for the future

IBM delivers on the promise of open hybrid cloud through its portfolio of products, including Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud and the IBM Cloud® Paks — optimized by Intel technology for consistent performance and security, no matter where the workloads reside. The IBM Cloud Paks reduce time to market for independent software vendors (ISVs) and enable secure, cost-effective, and scalable ways to build and deploy on modern infrastructure platforms. 

IBM Cloud Paks  

IBM Cloud Paks enable enterprises to leverage container technologies to build applications once and deploy anywhere across hybrid cloud infrastructure. They accelerate outcomes by enabling automated, intelligent, and secure workflows, and they are available for business applications, data, integration middleware, automation, multicloud management, and security. 

IBM Edge Solutions

With edge services, IBM Business Partners, and open multicloud solutions from IBM, enterprises will be able to tap into the potential of 5G to support crucial uses such as emergency response, robotic surgery, or connected-vehicle safety features that benefit from the few milliseconds latency saved by not having to send workloads to a centralized cloud. 

IBM open hybrid cloud with Intel 

IBM and Intel maximize the value and speed of modern, data-centric workloads from the edge to the data center, accelerating innovation, insights, and competitive advantage. 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors deliver outstanding performance and enhanced security. Intel also offers libraries and tools that provide performance and security optimization for data-centric workloads. This partnership is accelerated by IBM and Intel ecosystems:

• IBM has joined the Open Retail Initiative (ORI), a collaborative effort by Intel and other top technology companies that believe that open, accessible solutions will accelerate iteration, flexibility, and innovation at scale.
• IBM is collaborating with Intel to leverage Secure Device Onboard (SDO) that provides a fast and more secure way to onboard any device to any device management system at scale.
• Intel has developed a curated portfolio of market-ready-solutions solving a wide array of use case in many verticals.

IBM partner advantage

IBM is helping its partners create solutions and reach new clients through its ecosystem of experts and digital marketplaces. This creates many opportunities for ISVs looking to build and sell open hybrid cloud offerings. With IBM Cloud Paks, ISVs can build on an open flexible platform designed for enterprises, increasing speed, agility, and innovation.

IBM PartnerWorld helps facilitate partner growth with a Build Track that aligns benefits that support partners building IP and innovative solutions. This includes skills training, certifications, and cloud credits for new partners and an IBM Cloud Pak ecosystem program to assist. 

It also provides access to IBM’s global Business Partner Connect, facilitating collaboration between IBM partners to create new business opportunities, support common customers, and expand market reach. One business opportunity is IBM’s Embedded Solution model, which offers customers commitment-based pricing for the IBM technology portion of their solution, allowing customers to operate from a predictable cost basis.

IBM partner references 

Zonysoft

Winner of an IBM Business Partner Award in 2014, Zonysoft has partnered with IBM for over nine years. Zonysoft’s cloud platform is based on IBM products, including IBM Cloud Pak for Automation. This enables the company to reduce engineering costs and develop customer solutions faster by building on top of a trusted product. The company specifically cites the scalability and open architecture of IBM Cloud Pak for Automation as key reasons it chose the solution to achieve its goals for business process automation.

DeSmart

A finalist for a 2020 IBM Beacon Award, DeSmart provides business solutions that consist of business process management, enterprise portals, system integration, and data governance. The company has been an IBM partner for six years, using IBM technology to quickly build scalable and resilient solutions. The issue of scalability was a primary requirement for a DeSmart customer, which owns and operates one of the largest chain of pharmacies in China. Because of COVID-19, the pharmacy needed to migrate its applications to support mobile devices and automate more of its processes. Using IBM Cloud Pak solutions, the customer was able to reduce the time to implement process changes from 10 days to 3 days. 

Knowis

Knowis AG, founded in 2004, is an independent software vendor that specializes in banking solutions. Knowis has partnered with IBM for 10 years. Today, the company has an OEM relationship with IBM and builds products on top of IBM Cloud Pak for Data. As a partner, Knowis has built strong relationships with IBM, which is critical to navigating the vast array of resources that are available to ISVs. They also stated that many of their customers want the flexibility to run applications on any cloud, including private, public, and hybrid. Knowis recognizes that partnering with IBM provides many benefits to a growing ISV and plans to continue to evaluate additional IBM Cloud Paks as customer needs emerge.

Learn more

Read the full IDC white paper, “Cloud-Native Everywhere: Partnering with IBM on the Open Hybrid Cloud.”