The long-term strategy behind IBM’s Red Hat purchase

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Senior veep for software raps about containers and OpenShift to Wall Street.

IBM’s senior veep of software reiterated for Wall Street this week that OpenShift is the linchpin of Big Blue’s overall multi-cloud strategy.

Speaking at Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media and Telecom conference, Tom Rosamilia said the OpenShift container management family, developed by Red Hat that IBM bought in 2019, was key to containerizing Big Blue’s Cloud Pak software so that it’s easier to run wherever customers choose. That could be on or off-premises, or a hybrid of the two.

“By rebasing our Cloud Paks on OpenShift, we’ve now moved all of our middleware to an environment where I can deploy on AWS, I can deploy it on Azure, I can deploy it on the IBM Cloud, and I can deploy it on prem,” Rosamilia said.

This containerization of apps is crucial to IBM’s pivot to offering software for hybrid multi-cloud environments. Rosamilia said its applications and services, packaged in Red Hat OpenShift containers, are completely platform-agnostic.