C&L October 2017_LR (5)

Insight
O
Putting
cloud
first,
literally!
IBM may also be looking for
capturing a higher share of
public services market
By CIO&Leader
n Wednesday 1st Nov 2017, IBM announced
Cloud Private, a platform for enterprises
to leverage the microservices architecture
for building cloud-native applications and
refactoring their monolithic applications. This,
the company says, will facilitate “integration and
portability of workloads as they evolve to any
cloud environment, including public IBM cloud.”
The new platform is built on the open source
Kubernetes-based container architecture and supports
both Docker containers and Cloud Foundry.
IBM is the third largest cloud company globally
and is a leader in the private cloud market, according
to the Q3 2017 (latest) figures released by research
firm Synergy Research Group. However, IBM lags
both bigger rivals AWS and Microsoft as well as
challengers like Google, Alibaba and Oracle in
terms of growth. That is because of a higher growth
witnessed by the public cloud segment of the market.
The new initiative, on the face of it, will give
a greater push to the private cloud market, on
which it has a firmer hold, and drive its growth.
Some customers are having a relook at public
cloud, because of control and performance
issues while some others want to remain private
for privacy/regulatory reasons. IBM wants to
leverage this segment and grow the entire private
cloud piece of the market.
That is the stated positioning of IBM.
“IBM Cloud Private brings rapid application
development and modernization to existing IT
infrastructure and positions it to be combined
with the services and experience of a public cloud
platform,” he said.
IBM also claimed that “companies will spend more
than USD 50 billion globally starting in 2017 to
create and evolve private clouds with growth rates
of 15 to 20% a year through 2020, according to IBM
market projections.”
However, IBM may also be aiming to capture a larger
share of public cloud market through this initiative.
This is how.
IBM has a huge customer base that uses
its traditional middleware and other legacy
applications. Through this initiative, IBM hopes to
provide an easy migration path for these customers.
By building the platform on the open source
Kubernetes-based container architecture (supporting
both Docker containers and Cloud Foundry), IBM
hopes to facilitate easier integration and portability
of workloads between private and public cloud.
One thing that IBM Cloud Private will do is
to help IBM customers place IBM middleware
and other legacy applications inside containers
and transform them into modern cloud
ready applications by leveraging container
orchestration run by Kubernetes.
By working closely with the clients on their private
cloud and making it easy for them to migrate to
public cloud, IBM can genuinely hope to boost its
public cloud business.
This strategy is evident from the fact that IBM also
announced new container-optimized versions of
core enterprise software, such as IBM WebSphere
Liberty, Db2 and MQ.
October 2017 | CIO&LEADER
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