The IBM Red Hat OpenShift Advantage: ‘Waking Up’ The Software Ecosystem

IBM Senior Vice President of Cloud and Data Platform Rob Thomas, who oversees the IBM software business, recently got a call from a software CEO looking for help to take advantage of the multi-cloud Red Hat OpenShift platform.

The CEO was facing pressure from a board of directors looking to ensure the company’s software would run on multiple clouds and had found the only answer was Red Hat OpenShift, said Thomas.

“It’s been a while since I’ve gotten calls like that,” said Thomas. “I think the software ecosystem is waking up to how this is a really good way for them to get a return on their investments.”

The call from the CEO, said Thomas, is just one more sign of the “big uptick” in partner engagement IBM is seeing as it accelerates its Red Hat OpenShift multi-cloud software charge.

The consistent strategy across the broad and deep IBM software portfolio is resonating with partners, said Thomas in an exclusive interview with CRN. “We see a big uptick in partner engagement at this stage because people have realized that having an aligned technology platform strategy like this gives them a lot of leverage on their investments,” he said.

The partners making the big gains with IBM have focused on application modernization with cloud-native architectures, said Thomas.

“The partners that have tuned into how they are going to help customers modernize and get to cloud-native architectures and have built skills with our software are being super successful,” he said. “They are winning deals with customers that have never bought IBM software before. That’s a pretty powerful data point in my mind.”

IBM has also added new incentives across the software portfolio for resellers, systems integrators and ISVs.