Cloud technologies are advancing at full tilt with the aid of machine learning tools and open-source learnings, and new companies born in the cloud era are quick to optimize for an increasingly digital market.

But although cloud-native organizations enjoy these advantages seamlessly, legacy businesses continue to struggle through the replatforming challenges inhibiting cloud benefits. The emergence of multicloud offers a more efficient option than lift-and-shift migration, but the path to hybrid modernization remains under construction for most cloud providers still building their own enterprise solutions.

With the experience of both a legacy tech enterprise and emerging cloud provider, IBM Corp. is adopting an open-source approach to guiding customers on their digital transformation journey. “I’m focused on making our cloud the best possible place for people to bring their data, their applications, and come into that modernization journey with us,” said Hillery Hunter (pictured), chief technology officer and vice president of cloud infrastructure at IBM.

With her years of experience at IBM, Hunter is weaving new partner tools with established IBM technology to help customers transform business processes for a market that continues to scale up. Hunter spoke with Peter Burris, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent IBM Innovation Day event in Yorktown Heights, New York. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Hillery Hunter in its Women in Tech feature.

A new cloud era

According to Hunter, global data is anticipated to exceed 44 zettabytes by 2020. To help enterprise customers get their arms around this astronomical volume of information and maximize its value, IBM is combining its strengths in artificial intelligence and compute with newly acquired open-source tools, courtesy of Red Hat Inc., to foster innovation through the organization’s collaborative opportunity.

The $34-billion Red Hat Inc. procurement last October gave IBM a direct line to the open-source community and marked a significant shift from the IT company’s legacy processes to that of a modern digital landscape.

“At the IBM research facility, we can take the latest innovations that help us accomplish great AI insights and microservice integration capabilities into open source and work there collaboratively with people across the industry,” Hunter said.

The partnership provides a rapid integration of unprecedented software capabilities for IBM customers through newly available microservices offerings and a new opportunity to realize the potential of big data through more comprehensive analysis and insights.

“When you move to cloud, you’re modernizing your overall workload and bringing it into this era where you’re able to apply microservices and cloud-based programming methodology [and] bring the latest of software capability to your data,” she said.

‘The world is hybrid’

The Red Hat partnership is founded on shared principles around the value and practice of open source, with IBM’s open-source support dating back decades to its early support of Linux and creation of the Linux Technology Center. Red Hat’s open-source market influence, common values of customer attention, and high standards for product and security make it ripe for IBM integration, according to Hunter.

“We have a shared understanding of the value of open-source and the value of rate and pace of innovation that’s commensurate with what open-source provides — as well as then moving that into an enterprise context,” she said.

In today’s enterprise market, that context is multicloud. IBM sees more thorough modernization by bringing cloud methodologies to legacy processes, instead of dragging customers through the trials of migration that may not even leave their data in its most productive environment.

“The world is hybrid, meaning that there is data and cloud function needed on-premises and in public clouds. There’s a need for private, dedicated environments in the public cloud as well,” Hunter said.

Red Hat OpenShift provides the developer community and robust data science to facilitate those hybrid processes for IBM Cloud Private. That open-source support gives IBM a new opportunity to streamline cross-platform communication, optimize multicloud cloud infrastructure, and enable AI data analytics wherever enterprises need them.

“People are using upwards of nine clouds or more in many cases, and that has to do with this intersection of function and data residency and being able to bring software function to the data,” Hunter said.

The company is also working on a seamless option for customers to ultimately bring cloud to their data by first modernizing their environments and then maturing them to prepare for the AI insights integrated through hybrid networks.

“The IBM Cloud Private offerings enable people to, in their environment where their data resides, bring sophisticated data, warehousing data analytics and AI capabilities,” Hunter said.

IBM’s transformation

By providing an optimized hybrid solution through the guidance of open source, IBM is enabling the tangible transformation that has long daunted the enterprise. “Data today exists in multiple places, [and] largely because of that, people are partway through their journey to overall modernization,” Hunter said.

The company roadmap is currently driven by a mission of getting enterprise customers up to speed with the pace of open-source innovation and providing options in cloud management and security as the technology scales. “Our core tenets are keeping up with the rate of open-source as an innovation stream, providing choice in how folks are deploying cloud and deploying systems,” she said.

In addition to its open-source integrations with Red Hat, IBM has partnered with Nvidia Corp. to build a machine learning data science platform for “the most data-intensive workloads.” The company is leveraging these tools to create comprehensive solutions that serve complex custom multicloud environment needs beyond the scope of traditional IT.

“There’s a significant amount of IT that is currently traditional in that people are in the process of modernizing, and that may initially be through a private cloud context on the journey to overall workload modernization,” Hunter said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Innovation Day event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Innovation Day event. Neither IBM, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE