It has been barely 30 days since IBM Corp.’s new chief executive officer, Arvind Krishna, took the helm of the 109-year-old company. When he assumed control, Krishna made it clear that IBM’s focus would be on the hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence, leveraging open-source capabilities brought by the acquisition of Red Hat Inc.

As reflected in the announcements made over the past two weeks by both Red Hat and IBM, that focus remains rock solid.

“He started by talking about IBM’s focus being hybrid and AI,” said Mike Ferris (pictured), vice president of strategy, products and technologies at Red Hat. “We’ve been talking about hybrid and delivering on hybrid for many years. Now that’s being pushed as part of IBM’s overall message, and certainly we think we’ve got a good opportunity to take that message much broader in the market.”

Ferris spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. They discussed how one new release was the direct result of joint development by the two firms and building a hybrid platform for a multicloud world. (* Disclosure below.)

Leveraging IBM code

One of Red Hat’s recent announcements was the launch of Advanced Cluster Management. Designed for enterprises managing multiple Kubernetes clusters, ACM folded code from an IBM tool into OpenShift to support the new capability.

“ACM is a good example of how Red Hat and IBM have worked together,” Ferris said. “Being able to take that type of value that IBM had matured, take it through Red Hat into the open-source community, but simultaneously deliver it to customers of OpenShift and make it part of the platform is something we really see as a huge value add.”

The combined forces of Red Hat and IBM are expected to bring additional value through a mix of the open-source platforms developed by Red Hat and IBM’s strength in services.

“If you look at Red Hat’s history, we’ve focused on building platforms, whether that was Red Hat Enterprise Linux, OpenShift or JBoss,” Ferris said. “IBM has both platforms and a lot of investment and capabilities in the higher-level value services, as well as specializations and use of applications and platforms for specific vertical industries. This is about building a hybrid platform that works in a multicloud world.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more 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 Corp., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE