When enterprise veteran IBM acquired open-source pioneer Red Hat Inc., it seemed like an odd pairing. But despite its legacy credentials, IBM is a long-time supporter of open source.

In 2000, Big Blue made a strategic commitment to Linux, following up a year later with a financial investment of $1 billion. Now, as traditional enterprise is forced to rapidly adapt to digital operations, open source is providing a means to keep up with the rapidly changing landscape.

“This choice to be on open source is a choice to move at the pace of global innovation,” said Hillery Hunter (pictured), vice president and chief technology officer of IBM Cloud at IBM. “It’s a choice to leverage capabilities that are portable, and it’s a choice to have flexibility in deployment.”

Hunter spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during today’s Red Hat Summit. They discussed how IBM and Red Hat are combining forces to benefit enterprise and the importance of open source to post-pandemic business operations. (* Disclosure below.)

Open hybrid cloud brings flexibility and security to digital operations

The big question in enterprise right now is how to create business value from digital transformation. A big part of this is having purposeful conversations about cloud architecture and ensuring consistency of application management across environments, according to Hunter.

IBM plus Red Hat is a “one-plus-one equals three conversation,” according to Hunter, who explained how Red Hat brings Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift to provide companies with a consistent platform across different environments. “Maturity in many cases comes from consistency, being able to have standards and consistency and deployment across different environments leads to efficiency,” she said.

IBM adds its expertise in data governance, consistency of data, cataloging data management across environments, machine learning, artificial intelligence and automation. The combination adds up to a more efficient, secure strategy for creating business value in 2021’s uncertain landscape.

“Taking intentional decisions that are relevant to your industry that enable future flexibility and then enable a broad ecosystem of content … those are core foundational decisions that then unlock that value in the cloud journey and really result in a successful cloud experience,” Hunter stated.

IBM portfolio supports Red Hat

Since IBM finalized its acquisition of Red Hat in mid-2019, the company has reoriented its portfolio around Red Hat’s open-source framework. For example, Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud is a fully managed OpenShift service, and the company puts Kubernetes at the core of what it is doing as a cloud provider and how it achieves its own operational efficiencies, according to Hunter.

“We’ve been able to align our portfolio, get consistency and delivery of the Red Hat capabilities across our full portfolio and then enable clients to progress to really efficient consumption of cloud,” she said. “It is a set of unlocking value through increasing amounts of insight, consistency across environments, layering that up into the data layer. And then overall being able to do that efficiently and in a consistent way across the different environments where cloud needs to be deployed in order to be most effective.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE