I don't get it. Anyone have a legitimate reason for doing this? Maybe I'm missing something.
10 replies (most recent on top)
There might be a few customers that think the IBM name means something.
You are all rats on the Titanic. Start swimming now and hope for the best. IBM's days in the sun are over.
Lift and shift is useless marketing speak. Apps might be easy to lift and shift and I can do the same with almost any supported Linux distribution . The issue is and has always been data gravity. I don't care how easy it is to move between clouds, as a numbers guy, it does make sense for me to move data between clouds.
Its a flop concept like Cloud Foundry. Under the hood, all clouds are running similar tech like Docker containers and Kubernetes for container orchestration etc. They also constantly copy hit ideas from one another (AWS Lambda copied as Azure Functions). Frankly its not that hard to move from one cloud to another, although some re-architecting is indeed required. You don't need this "cloud agnostic" extra layer of OpenShift or Cloud Foundry.
The real question is how often do customers really anticipate to move their stuff from Cloud to Cloud providers? OpenShift is added cost and frankly not cheap at all... So, is that worth the cost?!?!
@kji spot on. “Hybrid” and “portability” adds no value, IBM needs to wake up from this dream. It’s alarming how out of touch leadership are with the market. It feels that it’s gotten only worse under Arvind.
I'd love to see stats on how many customers are running Cloud Pak on:
- AWS/Azure/GCP
- IBM Cloud
- On-Prem
My limited experience suggests it's mainly #3. Seems to be more of an Application Modernization for Legacy IT play than the Hybrid Multicloud stuff Marketing is going on about.
The main reason a large client would choose IBM is client relationship. When I was there a large traditional IBM client outsourced their non-IBM public cloud migration work to IBM and then booted us out for non-performance - four months later!
Based on first hand client discussions, it’s cheaper to move to a vendor’s cloud instead of open source. Lockin is a myth - once a company goes into a cloud the option to move out is typically not used. And when it is needed they can and do move out (aws to gcp, gcp to aws etc). Openshift is more expensive than a native cloud solution. Clients have learned the lesson.
Its not a question of going to IBM for support on AWS, GCP or Azure.
the main concern is about vendor lock in. IBM is refactoring products like Db2 on Cloud Pak for Data, similarly for Cloud Pack for Integration & Security.
These Cloud Paks are cloud agnostic as they are based on OpenShift from RedHat and hence they can be run on AWS, GCP, Auzre. This gives clients flexibility to lock in to a specific cloud vendor and therefore if Amz decides to increase their usage charge, they can just lift and shift to GCP or Azure or even IBM Cloud.
that is the strategy!