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Think about the rate and pace of innovation we are all experiencing as customers in today’s digital age – from securely initiating a timely banking transaction to rapidly changing a flight last minute on an airline’s mobile app or ensuring the video of a must-see sports final does not get dropped on a 5G network. All of these daily activities must be powered by agile technology platforms that can help businesses modernize in response to our ever-changing demands to provide us faster, better customer experiences.

A study conducted by IBM Institute for Business Value in cooperation with Oxford Economics revealed that enterprises have moved on from a single cloud approach and have entered the hybrid, multicloud era to boost flexibility as they work to keep pace with customer demands. If not managed properly, the shift to this new era can create complexities around security and interoperability, opening the door to major security threats that can potentially compromise your data. 

Our clients at IBM are often multi-national and operate in highly regulated industries. They are working with us to modernize specific applications and manage important issues like security, vendor lock-in and resiliency. Red Hat OpenShift is the center of it all, enabling an open hybrid cloud platform with security features built in.

Modernization is a must in a multicloud world, but it needs to be done in a way that provides clients choice and flexibility to enable a truly meaningful transformation – and that demands the right technology, skills and support to execute and succeed.

Harnessing the Power of Choice and Flexibility

Clients are under pressure to modernize, and the challenge is figuring how to go about it. They need to move faster in building more collaborative ways to leverage cloud technology that give them the flexibility to build and deploy any workload, anywhere.

Red Hat is a key enabler of the shift to hybrid multicloud. Businesses don't want to be locked into a single cloud provider, and moreover, as regulations become increasingly stringent, they often need to decentralize where their data is stored to remain compliant with regulations about where and how data can be accessed and stored.

This reality has led IBM to our hybrid cloud platform approach that opens the opportunity for us to partner with cloud service providers in the market. We know our clients will host workloads across multiple environments, and we want to give them the choice of how to do so with security in mind and by using a single point of control. 

That is also why IBM’s software has been optimized for Red Hat OpenShift to help clients apply AI, automation and security features to transform critical business processes to remain cutting-edge and support compliance needs. Rebasing our entire software portfolio on Red Hat OpenShift makes it easier to run processes wherever clients choose – across clouds or on-premises. 

Clients Across Industries Benefit from Hybrid, Multicloud Innovation

For more than 4,000 of our clients, an open hybrid cloud platform has been crucial to foster open source innovation and simplify the journey to modernize, improve security and speed application development.

IBM Consulting is working closely with enterprises globally and across industries to leverage its deep industry expertise and skills to modernize and migrate applications in a hybrid cloud environment. Examples include:

• PNC Bank Enhancing the Customer Experience: As the fifth largest U.S. bank, PNC is competing for customers amid a U.S. banking industry that is expected to consolidate rapidly over the next decade. To provide customers with easy-from-anywhere experiences, PNC embarked on a transformation program in 2019 designed to put the Bank in at the forefront of the industry when it came to digitizing products and services. PNC turned to IBM to collaborate  on the creation and adoption of a next generation, real-time event driven architecture to bring formerly batch data processes that occurred overnight into real-time updates. Giving customers the control to easily make decisions based on real-time data – whether it’s a deposit account balance or credit card payment status – represents a massive change for the banking industry. As PNC looks to further fuel its expansion, this new next-generation, data-first architecture – made possible by a hybrid cloud approach based on Red Hat OpenShift – is designed to serve as a benchmark for the banking industry. OpenShift allowed PNC to modernize its applications and create cloud-native development environments with its most critical data within a secured, private cloud.

• Verizon Combining the Power of Connectivity + Compute for 5G Era: As 5G becomes more prevalent, telecommunications providers are transforming their networks into agile platforms that can efficiently support growing volumes of data, voice, and multimedia services. Verizon worked with Red Hat to build their 5G core network services on Red Hat OpenShift and IBM service assurance platform. This open hybrid cloud foundation is designed to help them draw on the power of the immense up-stream open source community while retaining the architectural control necessary to accelerate new features, offerings, and capabilities  like network slicing.  All of these will help Verizon offer differentiated experiences to their customers like multi-access edge computing and deliver the vision of Network as a Service (NaaS).

Trust and integrity have always been foundational aspects for all of our client relationships. We believe our clients’ data should be theirs and theirs alone. At the same time, we know innovation cannot be done in silos. This is why it is important for IBM to build ecosystems to help enterprises gain flexibility and speed without compromising security and privacy. We fundamentally believe vendor lock-in goes against the spirit of true hybrid cloud, which should be open but also provide the security businesses. With open source innovation possible wherever clients’ data resides via hybrid cloud technologies like Red Hat OpenShift, enterprises have choice around how to modernize to achieve their #1 mission – providing the most seamless service to their customers.
 

Statements regarding IBM's future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only.