For telecommunications firms, the 5G wave is coming and it will usher in a new era of innovation. Yet the playbook for transformation from an open-source standpoint remains strikingly familiar to the senior leadership at IBM Corp.

IBM’s edge opportunity is to build Red Hat-fueled end-to-end solutions that will move data wherever the infrastructure resides.

“We’re seeing in telco exactly what happened in the data center,” said Jim Whitehurst (pictured), president of IBM and former top executive for Red Hat Inc. “Applications were tied to the operating systems and were tied to the hardware, and the same thing exists in telco infrastructure now. Linux for data centers is now Linux for 5G, which is a combination of OpenStack on the virtualized side, OpenShift and Kubernetes from a container perspective. We’re bringing the same disruption we brought to the data center 20 years ago, and we can do it in a safe, secure, reliable and manageable way.”

Whitehurst spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. They discussed the role of automation in building the cognitive enterprise and IBM’s continued focus on its hybrid cloud strategy. (* Disclosure below.)

Delivering business value

Real-time edge data analysis at scale requires different processing models, and automation will play a critical role. IBM has continued to extend its artificial intelligence capabilities, which included the recent release of a new open-source toolkit with AI extensions for the Jupyter Notebooks data science development platform.

“IBM has injected a whole series of capabilities, whether that’s being able to pull data and information out of existing workloads to a whole AI portfolio, which helps people build a cognitive enterprise,” Whitehurst said. “It’s all about having the platform so you can consume innovation to deliver business value.”

The driving force behind IBM’s edge and AI strategies remains the hybrid cloud. It is the central focus of IBM’s current direction, as demonstrated by the company’s acquisition of Red Hat Inc. and a consistent drumbeat of statements by senior management since then.

“Our hybrid cloud strategy, which Red Hat and IBM now combined have been on for quite a long time, has been all about flexibility and resilience in an unknown future,” Whitehurst said. “If there was ever a time when having flexibility was important, it’s now.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE