In August 2021, the tech industry will mark the 40th anniversary of the introduction of the IBM PC. It contained an Intel 8088 microprocessor and cost well over $5,000 in today’s dollars.

After many decades, IBM and Intel are continuing to partner up. Only this time, instead of joint work on an early personal computer, the two firms, along with Red Hat Inc., now collaborate on solutions for the hybrid cloud.

“By pairing Intel’s data-centric portfolio including Optane solid state drives with Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Cloud Paks, enterprises can break through storage bottlenecks and have unconstrained data availability in hybrid and multicloud environments,” said Kit Ho Chee (pictured, right), vice president of the Sales and Marketing Group and general manager of cloud, enterprise and HPC sales at Intel. “We’re pretty happy with the progress we’re making together with IBM.”

Chee spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. He was joined by Evaristus Mainsah (pictured, left), general manager of the Cloud Pak ecosystem at IBM, and they discussed the integration of Cloud Paks with Red Hat software, how Intel’s processors support OpenShift, and application management at the edge. (* Disclosure below.)

Targeting core use cases

IBM Cloud Paks are enterprise grade modular cloud solutions designed to integrate container, middleware, and various open-source components.

“Think of this as software that is cloud-native and designed for specific core use cases,” Mainsah explained. “It’s built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux with an OpenShift container Kubernetes environment. On top of that you’ve got a set of common services that move right across all of them. And on top of that you’ve got both open-source and IBM software that deal with specific client situations.”

Intel’s relationship with IBM was undeniably broadened with the IBM/Red Hat combination in 2019. Intel had a 25-year partnership with the open-source giant and collaborated on a wide array of private and hybrid cloud services.

Intel’s Xeon Scalable processor has been supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and the two firms have co-developed Intel Select Solutions for the OpenShift Container Platform.

“Intel and Red Hat have made commercial open source viable in enterprise,” Chee said. “We’re very excited to see IBM Cloud Paks standardize on top of OpenShift. It allows for Intel’s value to scale in Cloud Paks and ultimately benefit IBM’s customers.”

Applications at the edge

In recent weeks, IBM has introduced a set of solutions designed to simplify deployment and management of edge applications, such as the newly announced Edge Application Manager. This will pair with Intel’s Secure Device Onboard solution as a tidal wave of connected devices is poised to join enterprise infrastructures.

“Edge Application Manager allows you to grow and manage applications at the endpoints of all these devices,” Mainsah said. “We’re not talking about 20 or 30; we’re talking about thousands and hundreds of thousands.”

Last year, Intel released its second-generation Xeon Scalable processors, which IBM announced would subsequently be made available on the company’s Cloud bare metal servers running in data centers around the globe.

“The hybrid world is upon us, and the work that both IBM and Intel need to do will be critical to ensure that enterprise IT has solutions across the hybrid spectrum,” Chee concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more 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 Corp., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE