IBM Consulting doubles down on hybrid cloud with AWS and Red Hat

IBM Consulting began its 2022 Global Analyst Summit with John Granger, SVP IBM Consulting, stating it will “deliver business transformation services powered by hybrid cloud and AI [artificial intelligence] leveraging the ecosystem.” And thus began 24 hours of interactions with leaders talking about how IBM’s core has been made better by its unrestrained partnering to go-to-market across cloud, applications, and data.

And while IBM Consulting listed 13 strategic partners, this analyst team noted two of these were prominently highlighted in most of the breakout sessions across data, AI, cloud, iX, and business transformation: IBM’s focus on its partnership with AWS and the enablement of application and data orchestration with Red Hat’s Open Shift and Red Hat Open Shift services for AWS (ROSA). So, let’s dig into why these two partners may be a big part of IBM Consulting’s future consulting and services delivery.

IBM Consulting is “agnostic with a point of view”

IBM Consulting believes large, complex projects require a partner with the technical and business outcome mindset to deliver the highest level of business outcomes. This is where it continues to promote its technical pedigrees from chips to AI to cloud as advantages when assessing, optimizing, implementing, and managing. Further, it is doubling down on its Garage methodologies as the framework for opportunity assessment, ideation, and creation that brings a customer’s business and technology teams together.

However, as open as IBM Consulting says it will be in working with customers to choose the best solutions, it was very transparent about having 13 primary partners it feels can deliver deep value. IBM’s “agonistic with a POV” ideal will become more apparent as it categorizes and grows customers from its Foundation, Premier, and Elite levels. Growing from Foundation (core level) to Elite (the grand poohbah) will be determined by how much a customer allows IBM to become its primary technology and business partner.

Red Hat Open Shift strings it all together

IBM continues to let Red Hat function as an independent software firm; however, it is clear how important its solutions are to IBM’s augmentation of capabilities and partnerships to deliver customer value.

The rationales for this are clear, the first is the $34 billion IBM spent on Red Hat, and the second is how important IBM considers the need to enable customers to modernize applications to run seamlessly across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. This is more important than “lift and shift” services; ROSA allows customers to deploy, orchestrate, and manage new cloud-native application development. RHOS extendibility allows services to be designed, deployed, and optimized in parallel. This is a native and differentiated service that other services providers lack.

While Red Hat’s logo was hidden within the IBM technology partnership, it is clear from how often it was mentioned in breakouts with teams in data, cloud, design (iX), AI, etc., that it is an essential component of IBM Consulting cloud and application orchestration capabilities.

AWS takes center stage while blending IBM cloud into the ecosystem

RHOS’ importance is apparent in IBM Consulting’s investments in delivering hybrid cloud and its partnership with AWS. IBM Consulting announced ROSA nearly two years ago but many of this event’s sessions highlighted it. It is clear IBM Consulting will bring ROSA as its preferred solution to provide a fully managed, AWS-native Kubernetes service for cloud-native application deployment.

While AWS continues to develop its public and hybrid cloud offerings, it is ramping up its “AWS for Industry” offerings. With this offering, AWS is targeting 19 industries with tailored cloud solutions. However, lacking a discrete services arm, it must lean on partners to further tailor these industry cloud offerings.

IBM adds significant credence to AWS’ industry cloud by bringing domain, industry, and regulator expertise. For instance, both financial and retail firms that balked at AWS could find IBM brings both capabilities and controls to ensure data and workloads leveraging hybrid cloud solutions are managed in both compliant and trusted manners.

While it doesn’t preclude IBM from developing strong relationships with Microsoft (Azure) or Google (GCP) (both part of the 13 named global partners), it was clear IBM Cloud and AWS are its preferred solutions for hybrid cloud compute, AI, resiliency, and application delivery for its customers.

The Bottom Line: IBM is all about becoming the technology partner of choice and growing its share of wallet within its customer base for hybrid cloud offerings. While it has relationships with all three major hyperscalers, it is clear the current focus will be on the capabilities of IBM, Red Hat’s ROSA, and AWS.

Hybrid cloud success will be driven by how well IBM, its partners, and the customer orchestrate the application and data needs of the user. IBM is doubling down on its ROSA solution to orchestrate and its partnership with AWS to complement its own IBM cloud and on-premise data center expertise to create business value and gain share of wallet within its accounts.