Cloud migration has been around for years, but enterprises still have a lot of work to do and significant value to reap.

To accelerate cloud transformation, IBM and Amazon Web Services Inc. have tightened their ties and strengthened critical features, including security, automation and artificial intelligence.

“One of the things that we’re seeing with our clients at IBM is a lot of that low-hanging fruit of the cloud was achieved, maybe the lift and shift or doing some SaaS based applications, but now it’s even more important to rapidly adopt hybrid cloud and cloud technologies to provide your business with flexible innovation, transformation, all of those things,” said Bob Breitel (pictured, right), vice president of strategic partnerships at IBM. “That’s why it has been important for us to partner with AWS strategically.”

Breitel and Manu Parbhakar (pictured, left), head of strategic partnerships at AWS, spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed what’s new about the IBM/AWS partnership, how IBM is further fueling the robust Red Hat-AWS collaboration, the strategy to build a native experience for IBM software on AWS, and the expectations for 2022. (* Disclosure below.)

Landing all Cloud Paks on AWS Marketplace

The partnership with AWS centers around IBM Consulting, IBM Software and Red Hat. Much of the recent news comes from the software side. Until the middle of this year, customers who wanted to run IBM workloads such as Db2, Watson Studio and DataStage would have to go to IBM and AWS separately. Now that has changed.

“We have about 15 products on AWS Marketplace. I think about Trusteer verifying security, Cloud Pak for Data, Cognos Data Sage,” Parbhakar said. “Over the next 12 months, we plan to land all of the Cloud Paks – these are containerized version of IBM software on AWS — on the Marketplace.”

The areas of focus for the two companies are data and AI, according to Breitel. For example, IBM and AWS are working together to extend the reach of data tools to oil companies. The idea is that they can gain insights from untapped data to come up with cleaner, more reusable energy solutions.

In security, another area of ​​focus, many IBM products are already integrated with native cloud services to make customers’ jobs easier. And other integrations were announced this week, such as QRadar with AWS Security Hub.

“There’s a huge opportunity to help our joint customers to modernize and migrate on AWS,” Parbhakar stated. “We have cash, credit to give financial incentives to partners, to help our customers to migrate and modernize, as well as we are also creating a lot of technical content that is now freely available so that a lot of our partners can start this IBM focus on AWS practice.”

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