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.
The ‘Real Opportunity’ With ISVs
The real opportunity is with these independent software vendors—the ISVs of the world. If we can embed our software in there—just like at Razorfish when I was embedding [IBM] WebSphere into my solution set—when they sell their product I pull the OpenShift product with it and my Cloud Paks.
I agree with Arvind that there is work to do there [with ISVs]. We have to make it easier for ISVs to on-board with us. We have got to give them some economic models that make sense to them. The great news with OpenShift is OpenShift gives a software vendor flexibility to run on multiple environments. So there is a real business need of why they would want to get on Red Hat OpenShift for their business model. You don’t want to get locked into one cloud provider. You don’t want to get locked into one infrastructure provider. There are a lot of nightmare stories out there on people getting locked into one cloud provider and then they just crank up the expense on them.
You want to keep yourself flexible and OpenShift allows you to do that. You then can put a layer of data on top of that and then actually monetize it and get insight on it with AI. There is a really great value proposition for the ISVs, but we need to do our work to really get that message out there.
