IBM Relays Its Message About Its Hybrid Cloud Endeavors

In addition to IBM’s SoftLayer IaaS, Bluemix PaaS and many SaaS offerings, IBM has delivered its Relay technology to customers moving to the hybrid cloud.

Steve Robinson, general manager of IBM Cloud Platform Services, gave an opening keynote on growth in the cloud era.

During his keynote, IBM’s Steve Robinson said: “Developers are using APIs and building data-intensive apps at an explosive rate, but many, particularly those in heavily regulated industries, want the choice to keep sensitive workloads within their own data center,” he said.

The role of the cloud is maturing for the purpose of delivering innovation and business value.

One-third of the top 20 companies will be disrupted over the next three years.

IBM pushes a hybrid cloud strategy that covers private, public and dedicated cloud environments.

IBM offers up its four guiding principles for digital transformation.

IBM offers an integrated cloud platform with services, security, existing apps and DevOps.

IBM’s SoftLayer IaaS technology comes in bare-metal, shared virtual environment and dedicated virtual environment flavors.

IBM has more than 40 cloud data centers worldwide.

IBM offers public, dedicated and local cloud services, as well as a combination of all three.

IBM’s Bluemix PaaS technology, based on Cloud Foundry, is open by design. And the IBM Cloud supports a variety of open-source technologies.

The IBM Cloud enables a microservices architecture.

IBM’s Bluemix catalog offers more than 100 IBM and third-party services.

The IBM Cloud provides end-to-end orchestration and governance, featuring tools, such as IBM Cloud Orchestrator and UrbanCode Deploy.

Rachel Reinitz, IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO of IBM Bluemix Garage, talks about the Bluemix Garage concept of empowering startups to disrupt industries. “You can’t disrupt your own industry if you don’t know what customers want,” she said.

Angel Diaz, IBM’s vice president of Cloud Architecture and Technology (far left), hosted a panel on open-source technology and the cloud, including participants: Chip Childers, vice president of technology at the Cloud Foundry Foundation (across from Diaz, wearing glasses); Jason McGee, IBM Fellow, vice president of IBM Cloud Foundation Services; Mary Mt. Pleasant, senior cloud advisor at IBM, and Jesse Proudman, CTO of Blue Box (far right).

John Rymer, principal analyst at Forrester Research, discusses the rapid growth of “customer-centric” workloads in the cloud and the challenges many organizations have faced with private cloud.