I often hear the question, where does IBM position among all the public cloud competitors?
It may be true that IBM has multiple offerings and lines of business, it has caused some confusion. We do hear AWS and Azure come up first during a public cloud conversation, however IBM has it’s own unique competitiveness that cannot be matched.

To put it simply, IBM (International Business Machines) has always been with the businesses. That includes enterprises and maintaining not only a strong relationship in the Public Sector, Telco, Finance/Banking and other major industries, but also continuing to shift the type of technology to provide.
Often people would ask me ‘does IBM sell laptops?’ or ‘why did IBM sell the laptop business to Lenovo? Is it not doing well?’. IBM did sell laptops when that was what businesses needed. When more businesses needed the cloud, IBM transformed itself and started offering cloud solutions. Now the ‘distributed computing’ is becoming more important, including for regulated industries like the bank, so IBM offers Hybrid Cloud and AI. This is the current value proposition.

The IBM Solution Bried shows the 3 key solutions revolving around Hybrid Cloud. AI is expected to augment any solution:

Security
IBM Cloud provides default encryption for data at rest and in transit. Use IBM’s encryption keys or Bring Your Own Key (BYOK). IBM is the only provider that has Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 Level 4-certified Keep Your Own Key (KYOK) technology.

Open architecture
IBM has a longstanding commitment to open-source standards, demonstrated most recently with its acquisition of Red Hat. IBM Cloud is built to accommodate an open and distributed service model with cloud services via open APIs.

Enterprise-grade
IBM Cloud offers a robust catalog that scales with every business need. Easily migrate existing applications without extensive refactoring. IBM Cloud has the broadest portfolio of SAP and compute instances and is the number one VMware public cloud provider.
Refer to: IBM Cloud Solution brief

We have heard many cases where other cloud vendors could not deliver the level of Security that IBM has, and are not entirely focused on the Hybrid Cloud vision. IBM has even developed partnership with AWS and Azure to sell openshift on their cloud to enable the Hybrid Cloud, I think that shows strong customer centricity.

Now lets come back to public cloud. Where does public cloud fit in this Hybrid Cloud space? I have mapped out key offerings on the IBM Public Cloud that matches the solution brief:

  1. Security:
    HyperProtect offerings (Crypto Services, Unified Key Orchestrator), Financial Cloud, Telco Cloud

  2. Open Architecture: Cloud Native and Hybrid
    VPC, PaaS, ICOS, DB as a service, IBM Kubernetes, Redhat Openshift on IBM Kubernetes, CloudPak on IBM Cloud, Satellite

  3. Enterprise-grade: Mission Critical workloads
    VMware, Power Virtual Server, SAP

I would also add 2 more:

  1. Classic IaaS, High performance compute (from Softlayer) Baremetal server, Virtual server, classic networking and storage (Block/File storage)

  2. Other key offerings Blockchain, self-managed PaaS like Watson AI

To summarise, in a world today where many businesses are more concerned about where the data resides, the regulations, security and scale, it is difficult to move all workloads to public cloud and reap the benefits of public cloud. We will see more multi cloud setups where businesses use a bit of this cloud and a bit of that cloud based on their strengths. IBM’s key strengths for public cloud are in the above 5 use cases. IBM has simplified the business model too, providing services under IBM Technology and delivering consulting through IBM Consulting. More partners are onboarding the IBM Ecosystem program too, so IBM is very prepared to offer great technology, and for businesses that need the extra managed services there are Consulting and Ecosystem partners to assist. This business model and value proposition will help more businesses to Go to Market at speed.