Cloud News
IBM Worldwide Ecosystems Chief Bob Lord’s 7 Boldest Statements On IBM’s Red Hat OpenShift Sales Charge
Steven Burke
New IBM Senior Vice President of Worldwide Ecosystems and Blockchain Bob Lord says the company is upping its partner game as it sharpens its focus on Red Hat OpenShift as the standard for hybrid cloud and AI.
No More Competing With Partners
The important piece is we are continuing to activate the ecosystem with OpenShift and we are supporting the ecosystem with OpenShift. So we’re not competing against the ecosystem. That’s the subtlety in 2021. It’s a big change.
A lot of the IBM competition [with partners] was in the outsourcing space. Now with Arvind architecting the spin [-off of IBM’s $19 billion Global Technology Services managed infrastructure business, now being referred to as NewCo], that starts to go away.
We are a software and hardware company. Our mission is to get our products in every place that we can and in order to do that we need the ecosystem. That is a big change in 2021, and I am so excited about it.
We are a technology company that builds platforms and we are activating our products to the ecosystem. The platform is here so I can now activate the ecosystem.
Partners are going to see a big difference because if I don’t win the ecosystem game, I am not going to win the [cloud] architecture game. I need my whole ecosystem talking about this.
