IBM Corp. is losing no time in its efforts to demonstrate results from its acquisition of Red Hat Inc., which closed just three weeks ago.

The company today is announcing that it will make much of its software portfolio available in cloud-native form on OpenShift, which is Red Hat’s version of the Kubernetes container orchestration manager. Containers are portable, self-contained software environments and Kubernetes is a management layer for large container deployments.

“Cloud-native” is a term for software that’s constructed to take advantage of cloud-specific features such as near-limitless scalability and flexible, usage-based pricing. Many cloud applications are essentially versions of on-premises software that has been shifted to the cloud without the full benefit of cloud-specific features.

“Cloud isn’t just about sticking content in a container,” said Hillery Hunter, chief technology officer of IBM Cloud. “It’s about getting IT operational efficiency and automation.”

IBM said it will deliver the new functionality as Cloud Paks, which are IBM-certified software that includes a common operating model and set of services — such as identity management, security, monitoring and logging – that can be managed with a common dashboard. Cloud Paks are integrated with OpenShift and packaged with built-in monitoring, logging, metering and security.

Order from chaos

IBM said it’s addressing customers’ need to manage a bewildering assortment of on-premises and cloud services. Customers have “lots of options in deployment, but also lots of chaos, with clients using six to as many as 15 clouds with many clusters on each environment,” Hunter said. “They’re looking to unify their cloud strategy.”

Cloud Paks cover more than 100 IBM products, including the Db2 database management system, WebSphere middleware, the Watson Studio development environment and Cognos Analytics. They provide a full suite of underlying software and are designed for rapid and easy deployment, IBM said. The first Cloud Paks cover database management, application modernization, integration, automation and multicloud management.

“It’s enterprise-grade software with all the capabilities of the cloud that’s infrastructure-independent,” Hunter said. “For someone who may not have in-house Kubernetes skills to the extent they’d like, they can spin up an OpenShift cluster and it’s ready to go.”

IBM is also announcing a managed OpenShift service on IBM Cloud that features rapid deployment, automated resiliency, data compliance and security. Previously, a fully managed version of OpenShift was available only on Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud. IBM will also offer OpenShift on its IBM Z and LinuxOne mainframe platforms.

Finally, a new IBM services offering will deploy Red Hat-certified consultants and more than 80,000 practitioners to help customers with migration to open source platforms.

IBM has been moving much of its software portfolio to containers for the last couple of years, so Cloud Paks aren’t necessarily new versions of existing products. Rather, the acquisition of Red Hat has given the company a favored Kubernetes deployment platform. “We’ve been on a multiyear journey to transform all those product bases,” Hunter said. “This is the culmination of that.”

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