The global pandemic has shaken the business world, which had to quickly dive into digital transformation and the use of the cloud to survive and thrive. But some of the impacts are even more profound.

The crisis caused a major shift in mindset and increased empathy, elements that will lead to a new wave of innovation to be supported by the cloud, according to Briana Frank (pictured, left), director of product managements at IBM.

“Where some of our clients were solving problems like keeping their workforce safe by using video analytics to see if someone’s using or wearing maybe a hard hat in a construction zone, now that use case has sort of shifted,” Frank said. “And now it’s is: ‘Is someone wearing a mask? Do they have a temperature?’ The mindset shift is really driving a lot of these technology innovations, and then, of course, you need cloud to make those real.”

Frank and Jason McGee (pictured, right), fellow, vice president and chief technology officer of the IBM cloud platform at IBM, spoke with Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a digital CUBE Conversation. They discussed the technology changes brought about by COVID-19, the challenge that companies face to manage a distributed cloud, and the prospects for the future. (* Disclosure below.)

Demand for a central management

As digital transformations and innovations accelerate, enterprises’ IT infrastructures tend to become more complex, with applications running in different locations, such as public clouds, on-premises and at the edge. This environment represents a management challenge for organizations, according to McGee.

“Cloud is about a style of working and a set of technologies that I want to be able to consume wherever I need them. So that kind of application-centric capability and the rise of cloud native technologies I think go hand in hand,” he pointed out.

One of the demands of customers in this scenario is for a single platform where they can manage everything.

“A lot of our clients are using five to nine different clouds today, and that’s extraordinarily fragmented,” Frank explained. “And being able to manage and have one way to see what workload is running where and what is running on that workload is really important.”

Another business demand is having the flexibility to run applications anywhere they need, depending on the stage of their journey in the cloud.

Meeting these needs is the goal of the IBM Cloud Satellite, designed to help organizations to deploy and run applications across all on-prem, edge and public cloud from any cloud vendor. It standardizes a core set of Kubernetes, AI and security services to be centrally managed as a service by IBM Cloud, with visibility through a single pane of glass.

“It’s a way of consuming these hybrid cloud capabilities. Hybrid starts with a common platform, and … we are using things like OpenShift as that common technology platform that enables customers to build applications once and run them anywhere,” McGee explained. “What Satellite brings to the table is [that] it takes that base technology platform and it delivers it as a cloud service, and a cloud service that’s flexible enough to be anywhere.”

Cloud boundaries are expanding

By enabling central management, IBM Cloud Satellite provides companies with a mechanism to push the boundaries of the cloud closer to the end user.

“Cloud is becoming much more diverse; started as it’s these three regions and it’s becoming everybody’s data centers plus on-prem, and then it’s becoming edge, large edge locations, and then it’s becoming devices,” McGee stated. “So, clouds are becoming pervasive as a concept across all IT consumption models, and there are core technologies, like containers, that we think apply at all those levels.”

Many scenarios motivate this movement, such as the development of 5G telecommunications, high-speed networks for mobile devices and IoT, which need to be closer to where the data is generated.

“You need this whole idea of cloud to kind of expand, and if it doesn’t, then what happens is all of these different use cases become different technology stacks or different operational models and you get tons of complexity,” McGee pointed out.  “We’re getting much more complex in how we deploy [it], but we’re trying to put common ideas over the top of it to simplify.”

As the cloud expands and changes from an IT infrastructure-centric view to an application-centric view, there will be more room for innovation.

“We are really in the midst of a transformation on how we build computing technology and really a democratization of that technology,” McGee said. “That’s what really gets me excited because I think about: ‘What’s all the innovation that’s going to come from that? As more and more developers have access to this powerful infrastructure in these diverse ways, what are they going to create?’”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE