Optimizing Red Hat OpenShift with IBM Consulting accelerates cost savings, business outcomes
As generative AI trials move from proof-of-concept to scaled solutions, organizations continue their shift to hybrid cloud architectures to meet their digital business needs. This is especially true with businesses requiring data-intensive AI capabilities and high-performance computing. To support the transition to hybrid cloud, organizations often look to adopt a cloud delivery model for modernizing, migrating and managing applications, especially those operating Red Hat® OpenShift® environments.
Recent perspectives and findings in the IDC white paper entitled The Business Value of IBM Consulting in Hybrid Cloud Environments with Red Hat OpenShift1 sponsored by IBM highlights how IBM Consulting® can deliver capabilities to help clients deploy, run and use Red Hat OpenShift to derive business value in their hybrid cloud environments. Let’s discuss some of their findings and takeaways.
The IDC research entitled “Future Enterprise Resiliency & Spending Survey Wave 2,” (February 2024) notes that most worldwide organizations are adopting a multicloud or hybrid cloud strategy to support their digital business needs, including the adoption of AI. This shift has a few obvious benefits: improved IT staff productivity, improved security, governance and compliance and faster application modernization and migration. To achieve these benefits, organizations are increasingly taking advantage of containers and the Kubernetes platform, which help promote greater consistency and portability by establishing a common industry standard across environments. Using these technologies and platforms can deliver faster software development, deployment of changes and a modern, scalable and automated way to run large web-scale applications. But they’re complex and require expertise. The IT know-how to best implement and use cloud-native application architecture and development skills continue to be in high demand, challenging the ability of companies to execute their vision without a third-party resource like IBM Consulting.
Red Hat OpenShift is a cloud-based, unified application development platform powered by Kubernetes. It allows organizations and developers to build, modernize and deploy applications at scale on their choice of hybrid cloud infrastructure. The benefits of Red Hat OpenShift include increased operational efficiencies, allowing developers to focus on innovation and allowing organizations to build and deploy faster and support the scaling of applications.
This new IDC research highlights IBM Consulting’s broad and deep expertise of Red Hat OpenShift environments, on which IBM’s own hybrid cloud strategy relies, and which includes more than 40 hybrid cloud journeys that provide a technical path for clients to migrate to Red Hat OpenShift. Whether through specific expertise or an assortment of resources, our consultants have the knowledge to help clients adopt this cloud delivery model to help modernize, migrate and manage their applications. For many organizations, the decision to confer with IBM Consulting to help with their use of Red Hat OpenShift—including application modernization, migration and management—came down to 2 key themes: deploying quickly and deploying efficiently.
With insights from global- and industry-diverse large enterprises using IBM Consulting to support their use of Red Hat OpenShift, IDC’s research identified a direct connection between IBM’s expertise for their Red Hat OpenShift environments and Kubernetes orchestration to business results and realized benefits. Key highlights from the IDC findings related to the deployment and efficiency of generating more value from Red Hat OpenShift as a business platform included:
- 40% faster application modernization and migration, with IBM support, which reduced modernization and migration activities by an average of four months;
- 38% faster to market with new application features due to development efficiencies on Red Hat OpenShift, which led to more application functionality in less time; and,
- 74% less productivity loss due to unplanned downtime.
Among other business value benefits, the research notes that IBM Consulting and Red Hat OpenShift can help clients achieve an average savings of USD 78,500 in annual benefits per application running in their environments—nearly USD 20 million in cost savings for the average enterprise—while deriving upwards of 320% return on investment, with a 7-month payback, and an average of 9% lower infrastructure costs savings of over a 3-year span due to improved architecting and efficient use of infrastructure resources.
The IDC research concluded that “the combination of IBM’s expertise, prebuilt assets, best practices and direct support accelerates deployment, modernization and migration efforts, optimizes IT infrastructures, enhances development activities and improves overall performance and reliability.” With significant financial gains and efficiencies, the results of the study show that IBM can help organizations use Red Hat OpenShift as a core business platform.
Companies that are interested in exploring the potential cost savings and business benefits of using IBM Consulting and Red Hat OpenShift should check out IDC’s business value assessment and see where they have the potential to save both time and money from benefits spanning IT staff productivity, risk mitigation, business productivity and IT infrastructure cost reductions.
Every client has unique challenges specific to their business or industry. With new and evolving technologies and changing market demands, clients need help now more than ever to turn their digital transformation journey into a competitive advantage. Based on expertise in industry models, cloud and AI, the combination of IBM, Red Hat and an open ecosystem of partners can help organizations overcome their challenges and unlock benefits, including increased productivity, reduced costs and improved business outcomes.
IBM Consulting remains the industry’s largest Red Hat services practice and Red Hat’s #1 Global Systems Integrator (GSI).
1Source: IDC doc #US52545724, January 2025