The enterprise pivot to hybrid computing has meant a fundamental transition among information technology support vendors pivoting to strategies that enable streamlined processes for customers working in multiple cloud environments.

With its legacy technologies and new agility, the challenge of centralizing multicloud operations around one ubiquitous digital platform is one IBM appears uniquely suited to solve.

According to Ajay Patel (pictured, right), senior vice president and general manager of the Cloud Provider Software Business Unit at VMware Inc., and Harish Grama (pictured, left), general manager of the IBM Cloud platform at IBM, spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think event in San Francisco. They discussed the new complexities of hybrid cloud and how IBM and VMware are working together to serve developers in the modern market. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Furrier: Talk about your joint customers. What are some of the things they’re doing?

Grama: We’ve got over 1,700 customers. Together, we’ve moved tens of thousands of VM workloads, and we’ve done it in a mission-critical fashion across multiple zones [and] regions. Now, we want to make sure these people that have moved their basic infrastructure and the mission-critical infrastructure across the public cloud can extend those applications by leveraging the cloud. We want to make it possible for them to move their workloads to other parts of the IBM ecosystem in terms of our [artificial intelligence] capabilities.

Miniman: What are some of the most prevalent services that people are adding when they go to the IBM cloud?

Grama: It’s not about just moving your old stuff to the cloud. We have a wealth of new services, whether it’s blockchain, [internet-of-things] or AI leveraging those capabilities to further extend your app and give it a new lease on life to provide new insights.

Miniman: How do we help make networking, security and management simpler for customers?

Grama: [In] public clouds the mindset out there is, ‘If it’s beyond my data center, it can’t be safe.’ But when you start to build those constructs in the modern era, you really do take care of a lot of things that perhaps your on-premises did not take into consideration when they were built many decades ago. In IBM Public Cloud, security is at the heart of it. It’s all containerized, it’s orchestrated by Kubernetes. So you can not only build it, you can either run it on-premises, public cloud, or other people’s public clouds as well.

Patel: For the customers, it’s the safest choice; it’s the mission-critical secure cloud. You can now run the same application on-premises in a dedicated environment in public cloud on IBM or in a multi-tenant world.

Miniman: Where do developers fit into this joint solution?

Patel: The biggest thing to change is making these services available in a portable manner. For us, it’s about staying true to Kubernetes and upstream with the distribution, but then making it operationally viable. It’s a full life cycle with developers not having to worry about the heavy burden of running an operating.

We’re here to meet you where you are, regardless of where you are on your customer journey. It’s all about choice. It’s no longer only about public cloud, and you now have a lot of capability at your fingertips to take your legacy or net new workloads or any app anywhere.

Grama: A lot of public cloud service providers bring you over to their public cloud, and then you’re stuck. Everybody has at least two or more public clouds. They’re worried about the connectivity, the interoperability, the security costs, the skills to manage all of it. We have the perfect set of solutions that really start to speak to that problem.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Think event. (* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMware nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE