IBM ships software portfolio into containers thanks to Red Hat providing the packaging

There are many reasons for IBM’s recent purchase of Red Hat, but one of them became apparent today - the Big Blue has announced that it has packed more than 100 products across its software portfolio into containers, designed for Red Hat’s OpenShift. Linux-based application containers package apps and all of their dependencies …

[Pascal Monett]

"managed and operated by IBM"

And that is the secret, isn't it ? Microsoft did it with Sharepoint, copying SAP who did it with so-called complete management software ; selling a product but really selling you a team of a few dozen consultants to manage it.

And now IBM wants in on that lucrative market. You think you're spending millions on a top-notch "solution" for your company, but what you're actually doing is signing up for years and years of subsidizing someone else's employees.

Hey, don't knock it, it works.

[Sam Adams the Dog]

What took them so long?

When the (scientific software) company I used to work for got onto the Cloud, we had a heck of a hard time getting our major pharmaceutical customers to buy into it. They were concerned about security. We would ask, "Do you really think your own security infrastructure is more robust than Amazon's?" There were some lead adopters, but not many, and yet many of these same companies were outsourcing their internal IT to outside organizations, especially IBM, in what was sometimes called an "insourcing" arrangement.

We had close relations with IBM at the time, had historically supported AIX, etc., and I remember telling our contacts at IBM that if you had a cloud, all your existing IT-management customers would buy in, because they would be willing to trust you, even if they don't trust Amazon. IBM would respond with some nonsense like "Well, we already have a cloud." It was not by any means what a cloud had already come to mean at that time. What they had was a farm of supercomputers that you could lease by the day, week or month, based on what might be a long reservation list. A cloud implied leasing virtual equipment by the hour, the provision expanding and contracting per demand.

Their Cloud-Pak and OpenShift technologies are somewhat orthogonal to their own public cloud, but I feel they missed a big opportunity not that many years ago. Admittedly, it takes a lot of water to turn a big ship around, plus they were frying other fish.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What took them so long?

A cloud implied leasing virtual equipment by the hour, the provision expanding and contracting per demand.

IBM ***had*** that sort of setup at one time (before such a thing was being called "cloud"). They shut it down in favor of what IBM was passing off as "cloud computing", much to the disgust of some soon-to-be EX-customers. IBM can be ahead of the trend and STILL miss out.

[Sam Adams the Dog]

What took them so long?

When the (scientific software) company I used to work for got onto the Cloud, we had a heck of a hard time getting our major pharmaceutical customers to buy into it. They were concerned about security. We would ask, "Do you really think your own security infrastructure is more robust than Amazon's?" There were some lead adopters, but not many, and yet many of these same companies were outsourcing their internal IT to outside organizations, especially IBM, in what was sometimes called an "insourcing" arrangement.

We had close relations with IBM at the time, had historically supported AIX, etc., and I remember telling our contacts at IBM that if you had a cloud, all your existing IT-management customers would buy in, because they would be willing to trust you, even if they don't trust Amazon. IBM would respond with some nonsense like "Well, we already have a cloud." It was not by any means what a cloud had already come to mean at that time. What they had was a farm of supercomputers, fixed partitions of which you could lease by the day, week or month, based on what might be a long reservation list. A cloud implied leasing virtual equipment by the hour, the provision expanding and contracting per demand.

Their Cloud-Pak and OpenShift technologies sound good and are somewhat orthogonal to IBM's public cloud, but I feel they missed a big opportunity not that many years ago.

Admittedly, it takes a lot of water to turn a big ship around, plus they were frying other fish.

[Rainer]

OpenShift Runs on AWS

The version managed by them at least The latest version doesn’t even run on their own Openstack distribution (yet). It‘s on the roadmap, but it was released for AWS first.

[Anonymous Coward]

Some parts seem sensationalist. I know kubernetes, openshift, containers, I know that is not so.

[Ken 16]

Ported to Z?

Can we expect to see CICS containers that can then be exported to Azure or Amazon?