IBM's partner program now features new specialized tracks to help partners Build, Service and Sell hybrid cloud solutions, the company announced during the IBM Think 2021 virtual conference for partners and customers.
IBM, as previously announced, is investing $1 billion to modernize its partner program for modern multi-cloud and hybrid cloud opportunities. Much of the effort involves empowering partners to leverage Red Hat OpenShift for multi-cloud and on-premises application deployments.
The partner initiatives align with IBM CEO Arvind Krishna's effort to modernize the technology business through organic R&D and acquisitions.
IBM also announced partnerships to further drive business and technology automation. The effort involves IBM Automation Foundation which underpins IBM Cloud Paks for Automation. More than 30 partners are helping to drive the effort -- including Confluent, HCL, Infosys, Intel, LTI, Sysdig, TCS, Tech Mahindra, and Wipro.
IBM Think 2021 News Announcements
Additional announcements at IBM Think 2021 include:
- AI enhancements that boost Cloud Pak for Data. Customers can get answers to distributed queries as much as 8x faster than previously and at nearly half the cost of other compared data warehouses, IBM claims.
- Watson Orchestrate, a new interactive AI capability designed to "increase the personal productivity of business professionals across sales, human resources, operations and more." Watson Orchestrate requires no IT skills to use. It integrates with Slack, Salesforce, SAP, Workday and more.
- Maximo Mobile, a mobile platform designed to "transform the work of field technicians who maintain physical assets such as roads, bridges, production lines, power plants, refineries and more."
- Project CodeNet, an open source dataset comprised of 14 million code samples, 500 million lines of code and 55 programming languages, to enable AI's understanding and translation of code
- Mono2Micro, a tool that allows customers to analyze large enterprise applications and provide recommendations on how to best adapt them for the move to cloud.
IBM Red Hat vs. VMware Rather Than AWS, Microsoft Azure
Mainstream media frequently measures IBM's progress vs. public cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
However, the wiser comparison involves measuring IBM's progress vs. VMware. Indeed, IBM's Red Hat OpenShift business competes most directly against VMware's various virtualization and automation software tools. Both IBM and VMware are striving to provide application-friendly software layers that can fully blanket public clouds, private clouds and on-premises systems.
