Learn how to accelerate innovation with IBM Cloud Paks — pre-integrated, pre-certified, AI-powered hybrid cloud software.

It’s been more than a decade since commercial cloud first transformed business, but even now, only about 20% of workloads have moved to the cloud. Why? Factors such as data residency, skills gaps, integration issues, legacy application environments not supported in the cloud and vendor lock-in may be preventing most teams from fully modernizing their IT operations.

Business leaders have the difficult task of accelerating innovation, speeding time to market and meeting evolving customer expectations without sacrificing security, compliance or the value of existing investments. Organizations must move past the basic cloud model and open the next chapter of cloud transformation, cloud application and cloud management innovation to help successfully balance these needs.

The container and Kubernetes revolution

Enterprise lines of business look towards digital transformation and business process automation to drive innovation and create value. To deliver results, IT organizations are improving operational efficiency and modernizing IT infrastructure through cloud computing models and modularized application architecture.

As a major catalyst driving this transformation, containers make application integration and modernization far easier by isolating pieces of software so they can run independently. Additionally, Kubernetes provides a powerful solution for container orchestration and management. That is why IBM has embraced containers and built its multicloud solutions around the Kubernetes open source project.

Renovating legacy applications to cloud-native and hybrid cloud architectures requires teams to integrate on-premises components with containerized solutions residing in multiple clouds from different vendors, service providers and cloud providers. The challenge this introduces is that each cloud vendor offers unique Kubernetes distributions, requiring teams to double — sometimes triple — the number of management resources needed.

In 2019, IBM acquired Red Hat Corporation and has standardized its Kubernetes offerings based on Red Hat® OpenShift®. By delivering enterprise software via containers on OpenShift Kubernetes, IBM customers can build applications on a common hybrid cloud architecture platform that can run anywhere.

While teams can successfully implement a hybrid cloud strategy with OpenShift, teams may need more than Kubernetes alone. As application ecosystems continue to grow in complexity, enterprises will need to transform at scale, which includes orchestrating their production topology, offering a ready-to-go development model based on open standards and providing management, enterprise-grade security and intrusion detection as well as efficient application and data governance.

Adapting to change quickly and being able to continuously optimize and predict future issues is essential for digital businesses to gain competitive advantage. Enterprises across all industries — from healthcare to finance to insurance — can benefit from the functionality of public clouds and private clouds combined with the agility that hybrid cloud provides.

Accelerating innovation with IBM Cloud Paks

Building containerized applications from scratch requires a significant investment in cloud resources, talent and management tools. With a known shortage of cloud-native skills and short project timelines (businesses want solutions delivered yesterday), IBM customers are seeking enterprise-grade and pre-integrated software to accelerate digital transformation and innovation. IBM Cloud® Paks are AI-powered software designed for the hybrid cloud landscape. Customers are automating, predicting and optimizing business processes and modernizing business models at a faster pace without compromising capabilities, security and resiliency.

For the most complex projects and initiatives, IBM Cloud Paks were designed with built-in collaboration and intelligent workflows across multiple stakeholders to streamline communications and project management. IBM Cloud Paks help enterprises overcome obstacles introduced with the new application and operational complexity of multicloud environments.

IBM Cloud Paks are:

• Portable and can run anywhere: The portability of hybrid cloud solutions built with IBM Cloud Paks means that they are built to run on any hybrid cloud environment. They can run on-premises infrastructure, on public hybrid cloud infrastructure or in an integrated system leveraging a common set of Kubernetes skills.
• Certified and secure: IBM Cloud Paks are certified by IBM, with high standards and up-to-date vulnerability scanning software to provide cloud security protection of sensitive data and full-stack support from hardware to applications.
• Consumable: IBM Cloud Paks are pre-integrated to deliver use cases like application deployment and process automation for your DevOps teams, and they are priced and packaged for cost savings so that companies pay for what they use.

Modernize, predict, automate and protect your business

All IBM Cloud Paks are built on Red Hat® OpenShift® and are designed as cloud providers to help you develop and consume cloud services anywhere and from any cloud, allowing you to modernize with ease and make your data work for you, wherever you are.

IBM Cloud Paks are packaged based on solution domains and harness the combined power of container technology and IBM enterprise expertise to help organizations solve their most pressing challenges:

• IBM Cloud Pak® for Data: Unify cloud storage and simplify the collection, organization and analysis of data.
• IBM Cloud Pak® for Business Automation: Automate business operations to achieve better performance.
• IBM Cloud Pak® for Watson AIOps: Place AI at the core of your IT operations tool chain. Automate operations management decisions while resolving real-world operations management scenarios to deliver actionable insights.
• IBM Cloud Pak® for Integration: Automate application and data flows to improve client experiences. Connect your applications and data wherever they live. Get new tools for automated integrations based on APIs that extend capability and modernize flexibility for ongoing adaption.
• IBM Cloud Pak® for Security: Generate deeper insights into threats, and orchestrate actions for scalability and automated responses.
• IBM Cloud Pak® for Network Automation: Automate networks to deliver zero-touch operations.

No two journeys to the cloud are the same. As your DevOps and ITOps teams embrace the container and Kubernetes revolution, accelerate innovation with pre-integrated, pre-certified, enterprise-grade IBM Cloud Paks software delivered on Red Hat OpenShift to meet your company wherever you are on that journey.

Learn more about IBM Cloud Paks.