As cloud and digital transformation gain traction in the Middle East, the demand for open source solutions is intensifying, IBM executives said.
"Open source is the key and the future to drive innovation due to the skills challenge posed by emerging technologies. Sabine Holl, vice president of technical sales and chief technology officer for IBM Middle East and Africa, told LaComparacion Middle East on the sidelines from IBM Think Summit.
Holl had installed the first Linux on the mainframe 20 years ago.
He added that IBM wanted to integrate open source with a scaled-down version of the company. That is why IBM and Red Hat met.
IBM acquired Red Hat for € 34 billion and is the largest IT acquisition to date.
"Our hybrid multi-cloud environment is open from conception. We base our architectural design on open architecture and open standards. We began this journey 20 years ago.
"We created an IBM culture for open source. We have spent more than € 1 billion to support open source platforms, partnering with spenders and customers to transform this great idea of the open source community," he said.
Linux powers more than 50% of the server market worldwide.
In addition, he claimed that open standards launch applications, workloads and developers while being secure and open access to data and AI for new information.
Adrian Pickering, Red Hat Regional General Manager Middle East and North Africa, said Middle Eastern governments were supporting open source as a platform for innovation and fighting digital disruption and streaming services. me
"Companies are trying to find the right balance between innovation and cost efficiency, which is gaining ground," he said.
Stay flexible and reduce the number of blocked providers
Red Hat is the leading provider of open source solutions with Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. IBM middleware is also based on open source technology.
Holl explained that there were many open source projects, but these could have been developed by one or two people.
"If the developers leave, your project will not stick and develop further. Due to these issues, we, partners and ISPs, are working together to provide an open platform like Dockers, Kubernetes, and Linux," he said.
Multi-cloud is a given that multi-vendor public, private and on-site cloud, he added, adding that this technology must be open source to maintain flexibility, reduce vendor lock-in and be secure. .
"With the acquisition of Red Hat, we have been working together for many years and have known each other for a long time. Red Hat is the world's leading provider of open source solutions and together we are the world's leading hybrid cloud provider," he said.
In the next three years, he said that companies would modernize 75 percent of existing applications to move to the cloud, as modernization is important because companies have invested heavily in recent years to serve their customers.
Build once and deploy anywhere is the new mantra
However, Holl said that companies would take advantage of what they did and inject new technologies, but they also needed to develop new applications.
"Businesses are moving critical applications to the cloud. For the past ten years, we have been looking at the cloud and the cognitive age, and companies have begun to explore the possibility of creating mobile and social media applications to change the customer experience. That's only 20% of the workload we've seen, "he said.
So what's stopping the remaining 80% from going to the cloud?
The reasons, he says, are unique workloads and data requirements (compliance, security, choice of location), clouds, and multiple vendors (difficult to connect across the country). cloud and data center) and the technology gap (need for traditional cloud agent and).
"In the future, an open and integrated approach (visibility, governance and secure access to information) will be built once and for all and deployed anywhere (to optimize data placement and workload). ) ", He said.