New IBM Cloud Private software – based on containers, micro-services and APIs – bridges Public Cloud and traditional IT environments
IBM announced a new IBM Cloud Private software platform to help companies unlock billions of dollars in technology investment in core data and applications and extend cloud-native tools across public and private clouds.
IBM Cloud Private software is designed to enable companies to create on-premises cloud capabilities similar to public clouds to accelerate app development. The new platform is built on the open source Kubernetes-based container architecture and supports both Docker containers and Cloud Foundry. This facilitates integration and portability of workloads as they evolve to any cloud environment, including the public IBM Cloud.
IBM also announced new container-optimized versions of core enterprise software, such as IBM WebSphere Liberty, Db2 and MQ – widely used to run and help secure the world’s most business-critical applications and data. This makes it easier to share data and evolve applications as needed across IBM Cloud private and public clouds and other cloud environments with a consistent experience.
An airline, for example, could use IBM Cloud Private to bring a core application that tracks frequent flyer miles into a private cloud environment and connect it to a new mobile app in the public cloud. A financial services firm could use it to keep customer data in-house as it works to meet its security and regulatory requirements while taking advantage of new analytic tools and machine learning in the public cloud to quickly identify investment trends and opportunities.
Enterprises to Spend More Than $50 Billion a Year on Private Clouds
While public cloud adoption continues to grow at a rapid pace, organizations, especially in regulated industries such as finance and health care, are continuing to leverage private clouds as part of their journey to public cloud environments to quickly launch and update applications. IBM estimates companies will spend more than $50 billion globally starting in 2017 to create and evolve private clouds with growth rates of 15 to 20 percent a year through 2020, according to IBM market projections.
“IBM is at the forefront of empowering clients by providing a cloud platform which is built for innovation, seamless integration and is secure and compliance ready. With IBM Cloud Private, we are further helping customers embark on a cloud strategy by taking advantage of the control and security of their on-premises system with the freedom to connect or move resources to public clouds in the future,” said Vikas Arora, Country Manager, Cloud Business, IBM India and South Asia. “IBM Cloud Private brings rapid application development and modernization to existing IT infrastructure and positions it to be combined with the services and experience of a public cloud platform.”
Sanchit Vir Gogia, CEO and Chief Analyst, Greyhound Research said, “We at Greyhound Research believe very few IT vendors truly have the ability to handle enterprise-grade complexity of mission critical workloads in a multi-cloud environment and IBM’s Cloud Private is a step in this direction. We believe while organizations gaining the ability to run a Kubernetes cluster in their own private cloud environments need support from an IT vendor like IBM who is also solving the same problem in a Public Cloud environment and hence has wealth of expertise to offer on the subject. This, in theory, can not only help orgs get started quicker but also ensure better business outcomes.”
IBM also is a founding member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which hosts Kubernetes and Cloud Private is in compliance with its interoperability conformance tests.
