Akilesh Duvvur, IBM | IBM Think 2020
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2020-05-05

Akilesh Duvvur, VP, IBM Public Cloud, IBM sits down with Dave Vellante for IBM Think 2020

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https://siliconangle.com/2020/05/06/hybrid-cloud-transformation-ibms-three-pillar-approach-think2020/

The hybrid cloud transformation: IBM’s three-pillar approach

The possibilities surrounding hybrid cloud has really changed the traditional approach to developing enterprise apps, which is the past was very much a waterfall approach of linear sequential phases. As things begin moving faster and faster through agile software development, how is this all being embraced by larger technology enterprises like IBM Corp.?

“It’s a transformation for the entire company,” said Akilesh Duvvur (pictured), chief product officer and general manager of vice president of IBM public cloud at IBM. “It’s the entire hybrid approach that we have to take in delivering those applications. … They’re pretty much the mission-critical heart of the enterprise.”

Duvvur spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. They discussed IBM’s hybrid cloud strategy and how it helps transform organizations. (* Disclosure below.)

The three pillars of IBM’s strategy around hybrid transformation
The hybrid cloud transformation that IBM helps organizations undergo embraces many levels, according to Duvvur. From a public cloud perspective, it’s a transformation from how IBM’s services schemes engage with clients, how it migrates and modernizes, and how it takes that middleware stack and converts it into containerized software that can be leveraged and deployed in the cloud.

“It’s a reinvention of not just the way our customers interact with the public cloud, but the way that we as a public cloud provider and a services provider can react and give our clients the best value across that entire hybrid transformation,” Duvvur said.

IBM is hoping to become the preferred supplier for all challenging hybrid workloads, according to Duvvur. To succeed with this vision, there are three pillars to IBM’s cloud strategy. Pillar one is about embracing open technologies and using Kubernetes as the base — not only for the way it delivers upstack services like Watson or other services, but also in the way that it delivers infrastructure as a service.

“Our entire control plane is built on Kubernetes,” Duvvar said. “That was a big bet that we made probably two years before everybody else in the industry … followed suit, and we are the only cloud provider today that has their entire cloud based on Kube.”

The second pillar for IBM is around the assurance that clients have the controls required to be able to deliver pervasive security through encryption and access to their keys so that no one can corrupt their data in the cloud. And the third pillar is around enterprise capabilities.

“A lot of those apps are brittle workloads, so they have upstream and downstream connectivity that creates a lot of complexity and chatter in the application itself,” Duvvar said. “So you’ve got to be able to support those workloads from a public cloud perspective so that there is none of that chattiness and you can actually deliver those applications in a way that they can … be moved into the public cloud and then later transformed into microservices.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. Neither IBM, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)