How IBM and AWS are driving innovation in the cloud [Q&A]

As we reported at the end of last year, IBM and AWS have extended their collaboration, making IBM software products available as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) on the AWS Marketplace.

We spoke to Judah Bernstein, CTO, AWS strategic partnership at IBM, to find out more about how the collaboration works and what it means for customers and Ecosystem partners.

BN: What is IBM's strategy for cloud and how is it being delivered?

JB: IBM's strategy is focused on hybrid cloud and AI, and supporting our clients by providing industry-leading systems, software, and services across public, private, on-premises, embedded, and edge-based environments.

The IBM Ecosystem is a growth engine for the company and its partners, uniquely positioned to help capture hybrid cloud and AI market opportunities. Over the last year, we have been undertaking a transformation of the partner business, led by two core principles: we want to simplify the partner journey with IBM, and we want to be essential to our partners so they can win with clients. Our work with AWS is a great example of how we are doing this.

Within the IBM Ecosystem, I am the chief technology officer (CTO), responsible for technical collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of our key strategic partners. I came from AWS where I incubated several AWS SaaS and ISV programs, followed by leading a global team of AWS partner solution architects supporting a top AWS GSI.

BN: What kind of products and solutions has IBM built on AWS?

JB: IBM brings leading-edge technologies and expertise on AWS. Our three pillars for our partnership include Red Hat, IBM Consulting, and IBM Technology which includes IBM Software and mainframe apps modernization. Red Hat enables IBM's hybrid cloud strategy, by allowing customers to build once, and deploy anywhere by leveraging Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA).

IBM Consulting accelerates customer outcomes through proven methods and industry solutions and accelerators, cloud modernization, business transformation, and hybrid cloud services. IBM Software provides customers and developers with software and SaaS solutions on AWS.

BN: How do these offerings help developers?

JB: They enable developers to use purpose-built solutions that provide access to use-cases across a variety of industries and technology categories, including data and AI, automation, security, sustainability, and modernization.

The collaboration gives clients access to more than 50 IBM software solutions (SaaS + customer managed software) on AWS.

Here are some examples of the technology developers can use on AWS:

• IBM API Connect to accelerate API development and application integration for developers, enabling them to create APIs that expose data, microservices, enterprise apps and SaaS services.
• IBM Security Verify for deep context, intelligence, and security around decisions about which users should have access to an organization’s data and applications, on-premises or in the cloud.
• IBM Maximo Application Suite for intelligent asset management to achieve asset management at scale through automation, predictive analytics, and AI-powered computer-vision for anomaly detection of defects.
• IBM Turbonomic to right-size Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances and Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes automatically through AI-powered decisions, to optimize application performance and cost on the AWS cloud.

BN: What makes these different on AWS?

JB: Over the last few years, we have listened to developers, and they said that they are looking for hybrid cloud software and SaaS solutions that deploy on, are deeply integrated with, built for, and managed on AWS. These developers want IBM and AWS to be better together.

At a foundational level, customers can deploy IBM Software on AWS, on Red Hat OpenShift Cloud Platform (OCP), Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

IBM Software has a broad set of AWS Service integrations, including a few examples, such as:

• Developers can integrate data through a data fabric architecture with IBM Cloud Pak for Data integrations with Amazon RedShift, and Amazon S3, and identify machine learning bias and drift by integrating IBM AI Governance with Amazon Sagemaker.
• Developers can collect logs, events, and threats to achieve extended detection and prevention using IBM Security QRadar with AWS Security Hub, Amazon CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS GuardDuty.
• IBM Maximo Application Suite on AWS and the AWS Marketplace, provides intelligent asset management and integration into Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka (MSK) for real-time data ingestion at edge-based environments such as smart industrial assets within manufacturing facilities.
• IBM API Connect on AWS and the AWS Marketplace, provides an IBM fully-managed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that enables rapid serverless API development with AWS Lambda endpoints, and container-based API development with support for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), and Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA).
• IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack on the AWS Marketplace features were built to help customers modernize the mainframe, and develop and test APIs connected to IBM Mainframes on-premises with Amazon API Gateway on AWS, and adopt continuous integration and deployment on AWS, with AWS services including AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild.

BN: How can customers accelerate their cloud development?

JB: As a software developer, having a broad and deep portfolio-based tool bag of industry-leading solutions that deeply integrates with AWS services, enables you to accelerate development and obtain the greatest value of both estates, regardless of where the needs arise. Leveraging this partnership, developers also have the comfortability that our AWS product architecture is validated by AWS and FTR compliant, our SaaS solutions are fully managed by IBM and jointly designed and sponsored by both IBM and AWS, and the broad set of deep technical resources within IBM and AWS can enable them regardless of the development challenge that arises.

Developers can get started quickly by learning more on our IBM Developer AWS Partnership website or contact their IBM or AWS representative to get in touch with a deep technical specialist focusing on IBM Software and SaaS solutions on AWS.

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