It’s never a good idea to reinvent the wheel. So why do companies try and take on cloud transformation alone?

There’s a wealth of experience in the open software ecosystem; and the community is eager to assist companies on their cloud journey, preventing newbies from making easily avoidable errors.

“People want to tap into innovation, and the beauty of open source is you are crowdsourcing this massive community of developers that are creating just an incredible amount of innovation at incredible speed,” said Michael Gilfix (pictured), chief product officer for IBM Cloud Paks.

Gilfix spoke with Justin Warren, guest host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed how IBM, Red Hat Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc. are collaborating to make it faster and easier for customers to adopt hybrid cloud strategies. (* Disclosure below.)

Partnership enables enterprise transformation at startup speeds

Enterprises of all types are looking to open solutions as a way of both innovating faster and getting protection, according to Gilfix. Currently, only 20% of workloads are actually on the cloud; and it’s the 20% that were easy to move. The other 80% is “experiencing barriers,” Gilfix stated.

Some of those barriers come from sensitive data sitting in on-premises data centers or hard-to-port applications “that have years and years of intelligence baked into them,” he said. A hybrid cloud method solves the problems of fragmentation, enabling organizations to bring their existing investments into the cloud with the confidence of consistent security.

By creating a hybrid cloud partnership, IBM, AWS and Red Hat are offering support through products such as the IBM Cloud Pak for Data on AWS Quick Starts for data management, security and integration styles, Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (aka ROSA) to build, deploy and manage Kubernetes applications running natively on AWS, and the IBM Garage, which brings startup speed to enterprise transformation.

“Organizations need to make sure they’re protecting their assets, their data, through leveraging a consistent platform,” Gilfix said. “That’s the benefit of the hybrid approach. It is going to enable these organizations to unlock more workload and gain the acceleration and the transformative effect of cloud.”

The IBM, Red Hat, AWS partnership is a good match, because the digital hybrid partnership gives enterprise the tools for innovation without deleting the past, according to Gilfix.

“We can help to go and unlock some of those new workloads and find ways to get that cloud benefit and help to move them to the cloud faster, with that consistency of experience,” he said. “We’re giving more customers choice. We’re helping them to unlock innovation substantially faster.”

This is the only way for businesses to create the integrated, responsive, targeted and personalized experience demanded of a true digital business, according to Gilfix.

“Leverage what you’ve got. Play to your strengths,” he stated. “That’s how you create speed. If you have to reinvent the wheel every time, it’s going to be a slow roll.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE