This unified approach enables a gradual, low-risk modernization journey—one that preserves business continuity while accelerating transformation.
Chief investment officers (CIOs) are facing the challenge of how to modernize at speed without disrupting operations or compromising governance. Hybrid clouds promise agility and innovation, yet many enterprises still rely on critical virtual machine (VM)-based workloads that cannot be easily refactored or retired. Therefore, modernization is not about abandoning what works; it must be about integrating intelligently.
Red Hat® OpenShift® Virtualization on Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO) is powered by IBM’s agentic AI for application migration and modernization offers CIOs a unified, intelligent path to evolve existing environments into a more agile, secure and future-ready hybrid cloud.
Most enterprises today operate in a hybrid state, balancing long-standing applications running on VMs with new, cloud-native workloads built for containers. For CIOs, this dual reality creates operational friction, governance complexity and inconsistent visibility.
Hybrid complexity is one of the biggest operational challenges facing IT organizations. Managing multiple platforms, tools and policies drains productivity and increases costs. And traditional virtualization and modern container platforms often coexist as separate silos—each with its own management tools, policies and lifecycle workflows.
Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on ARO eliminates this divide by bringing VMs and containers together on one enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform. Organizations can run, manage and scale both workloads side by side without rewriting or re-platforming applications. This unified approach enables a gradual, low-risk modernization journey—one that preserves business continuity while accelerating transformation.
Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on ARO also simplifies operations by proving teams with a consistent model across environments—from provisioning and patching to observability and scaling. Platform engineers can monitor performance, automate updates and enforce governance by a single pane of glass.
The operational advantage is clear: fewer moving parts, improved visibility and faster response to business demands. In essence, it enables CIOs to simplify operations while amplifying agility.
Modernization must not come at the expense of control. Enterprises operate in regulated industries where data residency, access management and auditability are nonnegotiable.
Within Azure Red Hat OpenShift, enterprises gain a single control plane for orchestrating and governing both VMs and containers. Developers and IT teams can use the same CI/CD pipelines, monitoring frameworks and automation policies across all workloads. This integration simplifies operations, enhances visibility and ensures consistent governance—from on-premises data centers to the Azure cloud. For CIOs, this means less operational fragmentation, fewer tools to manage and a more cohesive hybrid cloud foundation.
Red Hat OpenShift provides policy-driven automation, SELinux-based security and compliance tools that standardize governance across workloads. Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO) adds the strength of Microsoft’s global compliance portfolio and identity management, ensuring enterprise alignment with industry standards.
Layered on top, IBM Consulting® services provide governance directly into the modernization process—ensuring that compliance checks, risk assessments and configuration validations occur during migration, not after.
For CIOs, this integrated model means modernization that is secure by design and compliant by default.
While the destination—a unified hybrid environment—is clear, the path to get there is often complex. That’s where IBM’s agentic method for application migration and modernization brings unique value.
The primary objective is to move virtual machines (VMs) with minimal changes, preserving the operating system, configurations and application stack. IBM’s agentic AI uses intelligent, autonomous agents to analyze workloads, map dependencies and identify optimal migration strategies for each application. These reasoning-driven agents learn from data, context and prior migrations to continuously improve recommendations. The diagram explains this shift and the acceleration brought on by the agentic AMM method.
When applied to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on ARO, this agentic approach accelerates modernization in three ways:
The result is a modernization program that is intelligent, adaptive and exponentially faster—reducing risk, manual effort and cost.
The capabilities provided by agentic AI must be consumable by developers, architects with system integrators (SIs), enterprises and CSPs or ISVs for them to truly make a difference. The agentic method for AMM answers this question by providing built-in support for the purpose-built asset platform IBM Consulting Advantage (ICA). ICA provides a centralized and secure platform for consuming all IBM Consulting agents, assets, services and applications.
ICA also hosts subset platforms, which bundle curated assets, assistants and agents, which focus on a specific capability stream, for example Application Migration and Modernization.
As part of ICA, IBM Consulting Advantage for Cloud Transformation (ICA for CT) brings together assets focused on Application Migration and Modernization. ICA for CT provides a unique Hybrid Cloud Journey framework that enables organizations to move different types of mission-critical applications to the cloud with consistency and predictable outcome.
An example of assets with agentic AI capabilities powered by IBM Consulting Advantage for Cloud Transformation, and leveraged by the agentic method for AMM, is IBM Consulting Delivery Curator (ICDC). ICDC is an agentic AI-led orchestration layer that coordinates multiple modernization activities in real-time. It uses learned insights and project telemetry to prioritize tasks, adapt migration wave plans and optimize resource allocation, essentially functioning as a “modernization brain.”
Assets such as ICDC form part of IBM’s broader AI-first modernization architecture and they integrate with other IBM assets and platforms such as watsonx®, Cloud Transformation Advisor and so on. This approach helps ensure that each modernization initiative is deeply intelligent, adaptive and outcome-focused.
With the agentic method for application migration and modernization, IBM brings together an extensive toolset that can support the end-to-end migration approach from discovery to deployment by combining IBM and Red Hat tool chains. This process is fully orchestrated by Azure AI Foundry.
Behind this transformation lies a strategic alliance that combines open innovation, cloud scale and enterprise trust.
Together, this partnership delivers an ecosystem where organizations can modernize securely, intelligently and efficiently—from infrastructure to applications.
The hybrid future isn’t about replacing legacy systems; it’s about integrating them into a more agile, governed and intelligent fabric. With Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on ARO, powered by IBM’s agentic AI, CIOs gain a platform that evolves with their business—unifying workloads, securing operations and accelerating transformation.
With ARO, Red Hat provides a single platform in Azure to migrate and modernize applications. Application migrated to Azure Red Hat OpenShift virtualization can be modernized in the ARO platform while progressively leveraging the increased developer productivity offered by ARO. Therefore, Azure Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization offers a compelling path for enterprises who are stuck in older virtualization platforms and are looking for cost optimization.
Some of the other compelling benefits of using Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization or ARO are
IBM’s agentic method for application migration and modernization can significantly accelerate the move to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on ARO. This method is able to deliver measurable time and cost savings while reducing risk through AI-powered automation and proven governance frameworks.
IBM Txture Application Modernization
IBM Consulting Advantage for Cloud Transformation
To know more about Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on Azure, powered by IBM’s agentic AI methodology, meet us at booth #1341 at Microsoft Ignite (18–21 November 2025, San Francisco). Visit Ignite for more details.