IBM is starting to pour resources into educating its channel partners on how to leverage containers running on Red Hat platforms now that the $34 billion acquisition has been finalized.
This week IBM announced a set of IBM-certified and containerized software offerings, dubbed Cloud Paks, that share a common operating model and a common set of services for running various IBM middleware offerings as containers that include tools to address everything from identity management and security to monitoring and logging.
The goal is to leverage containers to make it possible to run IBM middleware on any on-premises environment or public cloud, says Brian Fallon, director of worldwide digital & partner ecosystem for IBM.
“It’s all about running IBM middleware anywhere,” says Fallon.
As part of that effort, IBM is now making available the same runbooks for building and managing Red Hat platforms that are provided to the internal IBM teams. In total, Fallon says IBM and Red Hat currently share roughly 300 top-tier partners across their respective channel programs.
In addition to Cloud Paks, IBM this week also launched a managed service based Red Hat OpenShift on its public cloud. OpenShift is the application development and deployment platform that Red Hat built on top of Kubernetes. IBM also announced it will also make Red Hat OpenShift available on the distribution of LinuxONE it makes available on IBM Z series mainframes.
IBM also announced it is making additional technology and consulting services available for customers looking to modernize their IT environments based on Red Hat open source software.
As containers running on various instances of Kubernetes platforms become more widely adopted, IBM is betting the inherent complexity of those modern IT environments will result in more customers than ever relying on channel partners to deploy, manage, and secure those environments. The challenge now is making sure there are enough skills within the IBM channel to meet that growing demand.
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