IBM Corp. is expanding its commitment to move large swaths of its software portfolio to application containers while tightening its relationship with Red Hat Inc.

In an announcement to be made at Red Hat Summit Tuesday, IBM said it will extend its recently announced Cloud Private and Cloud Private for Data platforms, as well as its middleware, to support the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Certified Containers.

The OpenShift Container Platform is Red Hat’s platform-as-a-service product for private clouds, built around a core of containers based upon the open source Docker project, with orchestration and management provided by Kubernetes, all running on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. Containers are lightweight, self-contained images that combine operating system services and other libraries in order to abstract away differences in underlying infrastructure and make it easier to shift applications from one platform to another.

Cloud Private provides a vehicle for users to build containerized applications that can be moved across various cloud environments. IBM has committed to containerize most of its mainstream development platforms, including WebSphere middleware, the Db2 database management system and MQ Series messaging.

IBM said the collaboration will enable customers to more easily move applications to hybrid clouds based upon Cloud Private and Red Hat OpenShift, with IBM Cloud Private providing a single containerized view of all enterprise data. Developers will also be able to tap into IBM cloud services in such areas as artificial intelligence, the “internet of things” and blockchain.

“IBM has been transforming the way we deliver software through containers for a year with Cloud Private,” said Michael Elder, IBM distinguished engineer for Cloud Private. “Having a fully supported middleware story is something other vendors don’t have.” Certified support for Red Hat OpenShift gives customers the ability to run Cloud Private anywhere OpenShift runs — including in public clouds — with full vendor support.

The shift to containers has certain innate advantages that hypervisor or bare-metal deployments don’t, Elder said. Among them are improved ability to monitor container health, built-in persistence, simpler patch management and log collection and analysis. “We’re focused on this becoming an engine for digital transformation,” he said. “Regardless of the platform layer, we have a story to support it.”

Customers have previously been able to cobble together their own containerized private cloud deployments out of open-source components, but without the assurance of enterprise-grade support.

“IBM has always been good at helping their large customers deal with complex environments,” said Dennis Gaughan, chief of research in the applications practice at Gartner Inc. “As customers increasingly live in a hybrid model between public and private cloud, IBM has an opportunity to help them manage it.”

The deal should be a winner for customers of both companies, the analyst said. “IBM customers get additional choice for deploying their applications on OpenShift,” he said. “Red Hat customers who have historically used IBM middleware get peace of mind knowing that there is a path forward.”

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