It’s been about five years, since 2016, that IBM and Amazon Web Services Inc. started working together. Today, technologies and products such as Red Hat and SAP have become integral to AWS and its collaboration with IBM.

“I’d say the last 18 months or so we both invested significantly in the relationship expansion around the world really and joined resources and capability,” said Leo LaBranche (pictured), director of global strategic initiatives at AWS. “We knew there was an opportunity to go to market together.”

LaBranche spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during IBM Think. They discussed updates surrounding the IBM and AWS partnership. (* Disclosure below.)

OpenShift, AWS and SAP

Existing customers that are using Linux or Red Hat would be the ideal, initial prospects for the new multicloud OpenShift solution that AWS launched in March. That containerized solution, coupled with AWS services, is a fully-managed service based on the 2019-IBM-acquired Red Hat, LaBranche explained.

The brand-new ROSA, or Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, is “essentially a holistic service in which there’s a single sort of invoicing and vendor relationship,” an existing relationship with AWS cloud, or IBM as an advisor or professional services firm would be the ideal customer, LaBranche explained.

“If you’re already on cloud or you’ve already experienced AWS in some shape or form, there’s an opportunity to potentially leverage ROSA,” he said.

LaBranche also commented on IBM’s close ties with ERP specialist SAP. “Many organizations postponed large ERP implementations and large SAP migrations,” he said.

Healthcare, public sector and employment changes brought about by COVID are ripe, though, for post-COVID-oriented and newly thought-out SAP ERP digital transformations, according to LaBranche.

“It’s been very interesting to see some organizations completely change their business model over the course of the last 12 months in ways they probably had never intended to before,” he stated. “But it’s absolutely become an opportunity and a time of a lot of challenges.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Think. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for IBM Think. Neither IBM, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE