Meet The Former AWS Exec Now Shaping IBM’s Cloud Channel

IBM’s pending acquisition of Red Hat is expected to completely transform the cloud landscape. Former AWS executive Dorothy Copeland, VP of IBM’s Partner Ecosystem in North America and a member of IBM’s Red Hat Synergy team, weighed in on what’s to come in an interview with CRNtv at Think 2019.

“With our announced acquisition of Red Hat, which we expect to close in the second half of 2019, we see it as a huge opportunity for IBM to bring together the best of IBM and the best of Red Hat to truly bring forward hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, for developers. They can develop once on top of Red Hat’s open source Kubernetes OpenShift product and then it can be deployed anywhere. It can be deployed on-premise, on AWS, on Azure, on the IBM cloud. So, it creates a lot of portability and it’s really what customers have wanted over the years,” said Copeland.

Copeland was at the forefront of developing AWS’ channel, an experience that she says has been helpful in tackling IBM’s challenges as it enters into chapter two of cloud.

“The difference with IBM is we are so broad that we can solve any customer challenge, so it’s been a fun challenge to be part of a company in transformation. At AWS, I was there in the early days and they were transforming the market and now I’m at a company that’s trying to transform itself. With some of the advancements that we’ve been making on the product side with Red Hat, we are positioning IBM to take the cloud into the next stage.”

For more of Copeland’s interview, watch the video included in this article