Last week’s announcement from IBM Corp. that it would extends its Cloud Private and Cloud Private for Data platforms to support Red Hat Inc.’s OpenShift container ecosystem was a move by both firms to recognize the industry’s multicloud momentum. The action was designed for customers of the two companies to combine technologies from the both vendors in deployments for the hybrid cloud.

“People want the ability to run their workload wherever they want, be it a public cloud or private cloud, and do it without having to rewrite everything as you go across,” said Arvind Krishna (pictured), senior vice president of hybrid cloud and director of research at IBM. “For the first time … you have a complete certified stack. I think I can say we are unique in the industry in giving you this.”

Krishna spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer) at Red Hat Summit in San Francisco. They discussed the need for a more fluid and elastic cloud infrastructure and the significance of middleware as the emerging new “glue layer.” (* Disclosure below.)

Inserting microservices and apps

The announcement included the news that IBM’s PowerAI deep learning toolkit would also be available for users of Red Hat’s operating system. By making solutions such as artificial intelligence available, the two companies are betting that customers will appreciate the flexibility to add microservices or insert applications in ways that make network operations more fluid and elastic.

“Containers allow you to solve the security problem, to solve the patching problem, the restart problem,” Krishna said. “Virtual machines solved a lot about isolating the infrastructure, but they didn’t solve the top half of the stack, and that’s the huge power here.”

Moves like these in the middleware space raise the question of whether there is a new “glue layer” developing for the industry and how big a market it could ultimately become. Much as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol and Hypertext Transfer Protocol fueled the rise of the modern Web today, containerized applications have the potential to transform the industry as well.

“Containers on Linux with Kubernetes as orchestration is that glue layer,” Krishna said. “Multicloud is here today and I need to connect the data.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Red Hat Summit event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Red Hat Summit. Neither Red Hat Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE