In the game of poker, it’s called a “showdown” when two or more players reach the final round of betting and all must show their cards. With IBM Corp.’s announcements this week focused on artificial intelligence, hybrid cloud solutions, 5G and edge computing, the technology giant is showing some cards it hasn’t been playing before.

“IBM has the right cards now to play at some of these new tables,” said Stu Miniman, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. “In a multicloud, AI and open ecosystem, IBM has a real shot. It’s a different IBM for a different era.”

Miniman spoke with Dave Vellante, co-host of theCUBE, during their keynote analysis as part of the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. They discussed IBM’s pivot toward a technology-driven business model, Red Hat Inc.’s increasing influence in the company’s strategic direction, the role of OpenShift in new product announcements and IBM’s concerted focus on application management. (* Disclosure below.)

More technical approach

Prior to delivering his keynote remarks on Tuesday, IBM’s newly appointed Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna indicated during an earnings call that he would lead the company with a more technical approach. This coincided with the disclosure last month that Red Hat Inc. had given the firm a boost in revenue for the quarter.

“Arvind said he wants to lead with a technical story, which I really like,” Vellante said. “I’d like to see IBM get back to product leadership, and Red Hat gives them an opportunity to do this.”

Red Hat has figured prominently in IBM’s announcements this week. IBM’s newly unveiled Watson AIOps offering is built on top of OpenShift, Red Hat’s version of the Kubernetes container orchestration tool.

Watson AIOps is designed to run across hybrid clouds and on-premises platforms, reinforcing the notion of a Red Hat-based stack that operates everywhere.

“It’s being able to run wherever it is so you can take fine-grained advantage and leverage the primitives on a respective cloud,” Vellante said. “The key there is being able to do so natively. The advantage that IBM has is that the Red Hat-based platform is open source.”

Reliance on OpenShift

IBM also extended is cloud-native initiatives with Tuesday’s announcement of Cloud Satellite. The as-a-service solution leverages OpenShift to run workloads in public clouds or on-premises, similar to an enhancement released last year for general availability by Amazon Web Services Inc.

“It’s IBM’s version of AWS Outposts,” Miniman said. “We know OpenShift can live across almost any of the clouds. Satellite being a fundamental component under OpenShift makes a lot of sense.”

Will IBM’s increased reliance on Red Hat and its shift to a more technology-driven model make a difference for a firm that has been services-oriented in the past?

“It’s an interesting balancing act that IBM must do,” said Vellante, who noted that the company reported $21 billion in cloud revenue for the previous quarter. “A very small portion of that is actually what they call cloud and cognitive software. That is a bit of a concern, but at the same time it’s their greatest opportunity because they have such depth in services.”

IBM’s latest announcements regarding hybrid cloud and the use of cross-platform AI tools are designed to make life easier for enterprise management of application workloads.

“Modernizing those applications, doing any of those migrations we know is super challenging,” Miniman said. “IBM with their middleware history and Red Hat with everything they do with the developer community are well positioned to help customers along those digital journeys and going through those transformations.”

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

Photo: IBM