Predicting the future is always a tricky proposition, even for a multi-billion-dollar business like IBM Corp. Yet, company executives felt strongly that the enterprise computing world would become increasingly hybrid, a belief that drove the firm to acquire Red Hat Inc. for $34 billion in October.

“The world is going to move towards containers, the world has already embraced Linux, and this is the time to have a new architecture that embraces hybrid,” said Arvind Krishna (pictured), senior vice president of cloud and cognitive software at IBM. “We were clear that is where the world is going to go. We put our money where our mouth was.”

Krishna spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during Red Hat Summit in Boston. They discussed emerging trends in the enterprise application space and the computing industry’s swings between centralized and distributed models (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Need for common fabric

Through its purchase of open-source focused Red Hat, IBM is seeking to address a number of key computing trends, including the growth of applications to run the enterprise. Typically, an enterprise will have 3,000 to 15,000 applications running at any given time, according to Krishna. This requires a common fabric to modernize them.

“The fabric is based on open source, the fabric has got to be based on open standards,” Krishna said. “If we go down this path, you open yourself up to a much faster velocity of how you can deliver value back to the business.”

Over the years, Krishna has seen the technology pendulum swing between centralized and distributed computing models, previously affecting the desktop computing industry and now the hybrid cloud.

“In each of these a different answer came on how to unite them,” Krishna explained. “This is a new set of standards and a new set of technical protocols emerging. That’s the magic of this moment.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit 2019. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Red Hat Summit. Neither Red Hat Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE