For all the opportunity in multicloud computing, there are still plenty of unknowns. How to scale on-premises workloads into the cloud, which workloads to scale, and when to scale are just a few of the challenges enterprises face as they begin their hybrid journeys. Many of those questions can be answered by IBM’s unique support offerings in artificial intelligence, according to Ed Walsh (pictured), general manager of storage, IBM Systems, at IBM.

Walsh spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think event in San Francisco. They discussed enterprise multicloud priorities and how IBM’s experience and new integrations position the company well in a market driven by complex environment needs. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Miniman: Give your insight as to what IBM brings to that multicloud environment.

Walsh: We can help architect where they would go; we can help them manage a cloud and meet them where they are. We have full AI stacks enterprise capabilities. But some people choose to just use their own open source, and we can help them. Our multicloud manager allows you to manage, regardless of what you’ve got for your build environment. And we’re the largest Red Hat support organization. We can help people build up their own platforms and give overall instruction on how to go drive AI at scale in their environments.

You’re going to hear a lot about hybrid multicloud, AI at scale. The first 20 percent of workloads was about these application-driven events, but 80 percent of the workloads were still on-premises. That next phase by the organizations [is] mission-critical data and how to do that. There’s a role for hybrid, which plays perfectly for us.

Miniman: Explain what the modern storage market is.

Walsh: Everyone’s trying to be data driven, and it’s easy to say, hard to do. It’s a hybrid multicloud, but also there is a role for on-premises. How do you easily connect but get the same agility and performance and cost benefit on-premises and then extend at the right time for cloud?

Where people are being successful, being data driven, we see it fall into three success criteria. One is people just modernizing, going from traditional to private clouds, making sure they extend benefits of public cloud and be more data driven.

Another section, people really driving AI in general. But then how do you scale? Everyone has these random acts of AI or machine learning, but they can’t scale them for the business, let alone across the enterprise, which is where everyone needs to get to. That’s where we’re really focused on the offering set. The third one is just containers in general.

Vellante: Why is AI at scale so difficult?

Walsh: It’s a black box; it’s mysterious. It’s really just computer science — you bring the data you need, and we’ll help you with the governance of strategy, getting something valuable to the business. You want to let the business units drive. But then you almost have data warehousing of the past. You have these islands, and you don’t have any trusted source of the truth.

That’s where IBM Storage plays, and that’s where we’re truly differentiated. We do Spectrum Scale where we can scale up from [an] individual server to half rack. You can’t have AI without IA, information architecture. It definitely has to be in the infrastructure, and we’re doing it across hybrid multicloud on-premises. We can extend those environments and run the same thing in any of the public clouds.

Vellante: Red Hat has quite a bit of a storage portfolio. What [do] you think of that portfolio?

Walsh: We’re going to keep [Red Hat] independent; that’s a very important part of the message. It’s completely complementary to what we do. We believe containers are critical. We believe Linux is critical. If you look at what people are doing on the cloud, it is mostly Linux, and the enterprises have chosen Red Hat.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE