The keynote remarks delivered by IBM Corp. Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty at IBM Think in San Francisco on Tuesday were less of a product pitch and more of a dialogue with partners and customers around digital reinvention and the evolving role of multicloud in the enterprise.

The presentation comes at a time when the rest of the cloud industry is furiously trying to catch up to cloud infrastructure leader Amazon Web Services Inc.

“It’s going to be multicloud, and winner take most,” said John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the second day of theCUBE’s coverage at the IBM Think event. “The game right now is to stop Amazon. This is IBM’s last stand. This is like the Alamo for them.”

Furrier was joined by co-hosts Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman, and they discussed points made and missed during Tuesday’s keynote remarks and the significant impact of Red Hat in IBM’s future plans. (* Disclosure below.)

Lack of Red Hat details

For IBM to make its stand, the company’s acquisition of Red Hat Inc. will play a critical role. The purchase of the open-source software firm in October was widely viewed as an important ingredient in IBM’s move to become a major multicloud player.

Although Rometty was joined on the keynote stage by Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, their dialogue failed to reveal any specifics around the integration of Red Hat into IBM’s overall business plan.

“I would have liked to have heard six months on what that rationale is and how they’re going to help transform in this new chapter and what role Red Hat was going to play,” Vellante said. “I thought it was a missed opportunity.”

Despite a lack of detail surrounding IBM’s open-source strategy on Tuesday, analysts are also mindful that the Red Hat acquisition will bring more developers into the fold. Red Hat has an estimated 8 million developers using its technology on a global basis.

“IBM is no stranger to open source,” Miniman said. “It’s the developers where IBM needs to go, and that’s where Red Hat has a bevy of them.”

Here’s the complete independent video analysis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s weeklong coverage of the IBM Think event. (*Disclosure: TheCUBE is a media partner at IBM Think. Neither IBM nor sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: IBM Live @Think