Image source @ Visual China
In July, IBM completed the acquisition of red hat, an open source hybrid cloud leader, for a whopping $34 billion (see Titanium Media above: Is a $34 billion "Red Hat" worth it? | Titanium Media Depth).
Four months later, IBM announced at its headquarters in China, Pangu Grandview Office, that it had converted IBM's software portfolio into cloud-native and released the first batch of transformation results, the IBM Cloud Paks portfolio, which was launched in China and running on Red Hat OpenShift, and Digital China became the first selected partner of IBM Cloud Paks in China.
There are three key pieces of information: first, IBM embarked on the road of cloud native; second, IBM did not seize the opportunity of the first wave of cloud computing, but the opportunity of the second wave of hybrid cloud, IBM decided to fight a battle; third, IBM Cloud's partners in China chose Digital China to solve the problem of cloud services entering China.
Cloud native (Cloud Native), mainly involved in three concepts: DevOps, microservices and container technology, has become the choice of most of the world's enterprises, from the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation, cloud native computing foundation) official website, Titanium Media learned that there are currently 1895828 companies that choose to join the cloud native circle of friends. The total market capitalization is $14.11 trillion, and the total financing is $63.008 billion.
A cloud-native enterprise atlas published by the CNCF
Keith Chan, director of CNCF China, previously revealed at CNBPS 2019 (2019 Cloud Native Technology Practice Summit) that the application of cloud native technology in production has grown by more than 200%, and he said that more and more enterprises or organizations choose cloud native for three main reasons:
1. Cloud-native infrastructure can achieve higher utilization with the same number of servers; 2. It can achieve rapid expansion and improve the service faster in the case of low risk; 3. Cloud native allows for multi-cloud environments (workloads running on or across public clouds) and hybrid clouds (moving workloads between private data centers and public clouds).
The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology has also disclosed a set of data that more than 70% of domestic companies have used container technology or are testing application environments, of which 36.4% have used container technology.
This also proves that if cloud computing service providers choose cloud native, in fact, the opportunities behind it are huge, and the trump card Red Hat in the hands of IBM also has an unshakable position in the field of cloud native. After IBM's acquisition of Red Hat, the high-profile announcement of embracing cloud native is actually to maximize Red Hat's dominant position in the cloud native field, hoping to absorb Red Hat's influence in the cloud native field and re-establish its position in cloud computing.
From IBM's official information, Titanium Media learned that after completing the acquisition, IBM has rapidly integrated IBM Cloud with Red Hat's previous OpenShift, enterprise Linux and other products:
1. Release of RED HAT OpenShift based on IBM Cloud: A flexible, fully managed OpenShift on IBM's public cloud that enables auto-recovery, data compliance, and security through one-click deployments to help businesses quickly modernize and migrate to hybrid cloud infrastructures.
2. Release of Red Hat OpenShift based on IBM Z and LinuxONE: IBM introduced Red Hat OpenShift to its enterprise-class systems, IBM Z and LinuxONE, which support more than 30 billion transactions worldwide every day. In addition, IBM already supports OpenShift on its Power Systems and storage devices.
3. Consulting and technical services for Red Hat: A new IBM service is provided by one of the world's largest team of Red Hat Certified Consultants and more than 80,000 cloud application services professionals, advising customers on advising, migrating, building, and managing workloads.
At the same time, IBM also recently announced that the IBM certified open source containerization software IBM Cloud Paks portfolio has been launched in China, IBM Cloud Paks is the underlying can be compatible with AWS, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud and other "arbitrary clouds". Its capabilities are to provide a common operating model and service portfolio, including identity management, security, monitoring, and logging, and provide enterprise customers with a cross-cloud platform visibility control management experience through a unified, intuitive operating interface.
In other words, IBM Cloud Paks actually plays the role of a multi-cloud management tool, the backbone of IBM's hybrid cloud solution.
IBM Cloud Paks
IT IS KNOWN THAT IBM CLOUD PAKS CONTAINS FIVE SOLUTIONS:
IBM Cloud Pak for Data simplifies and automates the way businesses acquire data insights, and can also provide an open, scalable architecture for enterprises, resulting in 430% faster AI data virtualization. IBM Cloud Pak for Application helps businesses better modernize, build, deploy and run applications, helping IBM customers in the fintech space reduce development time by 84%. IBM Cloud Pak for Integration, which helps integrate applications, data, cloud services and application programming interfaces (APIs), is designed to reduce integration costs by 33%. 4.IBM Cloud Pak for Automation to help transform business processes, decisions and the way content works. One bank customer once used it to reduce manual processes by 80%. IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management, which provides multi-cloud visualization, governance and automation services, helps customers reduce operating expenses that support large-scale cloud-native environments by 75%.
Overall, although the five solutions of IBM Cloud Pak combine the respective advantages of IBM and Red Hat, this open source container cluster management tool has been done by many entrepreneurial companies before, and IBM, which has a market value of hundreds of billions of dollars, may still face some challenges in front of these startups with many years of professional experience.
More representative companies, such as Rancher Labs from Silicon Valley, and Domestic Sparrow. Previously, Chen Kai, CTO of Lingque cloud, also made no secret of the competitive relationship with Red Hat OpenShift in an interview with Titanium Media: "There is competition and cooperation, and competition will definitely exist, and may even be the largest." But Chen Kai also said that Lingqueyun's container management platform can include OpenShift, "replace our own AKS with OpenShift, and use it completely as K8S, because OpenShift is also an open source K8S-compatible application." ”
Although there is competition, for IBM, embracing cloud native, launching open source tools that are compatible with the resources of different cloud service providers, and then doing a good job of hybrid cloud is the second and perhaps last opportunity for it to seize cloud computing.
Screenshot of IBM earnings report
IBM released the third quarter of 2019 financial report in the middle of last month, showing that the total revenue for the quarter was $18 billion, of which the revenue from cloud computing was $5 billion, and cloud revenue increased by 14% year-on-year, accounting for 27% of total revenue. Bao Zhuolan stressed that in the past 12 months, IBM's cloud computing revenue has reached $20 billion, and Red Hat's revenue growth rate that just completed the acquisition in July has increased to 20%, a large part of which comes from the double-digit growth of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux).
IBM wanted nothing more than these performances to justify its previous decisions: In early 2016, IBM officially announced its transformation into a cognitive solutions and cloud platform company.
IBM's revenue over the years
But from IBM's longer-term perspective, IBM has actually had five consecutive quarters of year-on-year revenue decline, and the overall revenue has declined. If we look at the first quarter of 2017 as IBM's lowest revenue in previous years, we can also see that the reversal effect of IBM's strategy to the cloud is not very obvious.
In Q4 2019, whether IBM's financial performance can release more signals of "successful transformation", IBM can only fight against the water.
At ibm's Cloud Paks conference on Nov. 5, Alain Benichou, CEO of IBM Greater China, cited a set of IDC data: "Cloud adoption is growing rapidly, but the study found that only about 20 percent of enterprise workloads are deployed on the public cloud," continuing, "The remaining 80 percent is a tough bone to gnaw on and an opportunity for IBM." ”
IBM believes that the remaining 80% is a more traditional IT architecture, a core asset that enterprises will not easily go to the cloud, and must use a hybrid cloud approach to do a good job, which is also the second chapter of cloud computing that IBM is about to open.
Bao Zhuolan at the press conference
The IDC report also predicts that hybrid multicloud is the future of cloud computing, with opportunities here exceeding $1 trillion. It is worth mentioning that in the public cloud IaaS market report released by IDC in July this year, the total amount of the global public cloud IaaS market in 2018 has just reached $35.97 billion, and the figure predicted by another consulting agency Gartner that the global public cloud market can break through in 2019 is only $200 billion, which is a huge gap with the $1,000 billion of hybrid multi-cloud, which is why IBM is determined to take the remaining 80%.
If IBM had taken a different approach to focusing on hybrid clouds, the various public cloud market rankings would have been less important to IBM.
In the 2018 global public cloud IaaS market share ranking released by IDC, IBM is in fourth place
As mentioned earlier, IBM has made a high-profile announcement of its partnership with Digital China on IBM Cloud Paks.
Ming Ye, Vice President and General Manager of IBM's Partner Ecosystem Division, described it this way: "Today is an important milestone for IBM China and Digital China to open a new cooperation in the second chapter of enterprise digital transformation. In the future, IBM will work with Digital China to combine the technical advantages, market advantages and transformation experience of both parties to expand the ecosystem, open up new bureaus, and effectively help enterprises achieve the next stage of digital reshaping. ”
According to the regulatory requirements of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, foreign cloud service companies entering the Chinese market must leave data centers in China, which also means that these foreign cloud service providers need to seek a reliable partner in China, we can see that AWS chose Halo Xinnet and West Cloud Data, and Microsoft Azure chose 21Vianet. Digital China plays a role similar to Halo Xinnet and 21Vianet, that is to say, to some extent, IBM Cloud has solved the problem of entering China, and Digital China's partner also has a certain background accumulation in the cloud computing market, which is a good choice.
IDC public cloud IaaS+PaaS market share in the first half of 2019
IBM has always been known as Watson, as well as its servers and other IT infrastructure, in the "top ten Chinese public cloud IaaS + PaaS vendors market share in the first half of 2019" just released by IDC today, Ali, Tencent, AWS, China Telecom, Huawei jointly occupy 74% of the market share, IBM Cloud list is not named.
As mentioned earlier, IBM, which weakens the public cloud and wants to be a hybrid cloud, cannot escape PaaS, whether it is the newly launched cloud-native container management tool IBM Cloud Paks, or its ace Red Hat OpenShift, more or less involved in a certain PaaS business. Therefore, after IBM opens the second chapter of cloud computing, the pattern of "no name on the list" may be broken.
As Bao Zhuolan said, hybrid cloud is the second battleground for cloud computing competition, and it is also the future focus of IBM Cloud. However, from the perspective of the overall cloud computing competitive trend, IBM Cloud has only just embarked on the starting point in the hybrid cloud, and whether Digital China can help IBM Cloud take the road to China remains to be verified. (This article was first published by Titanium Media, author/Qin Conghui)
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