"Cloud Marketplace 2019" IBM Pushes Hybrid Cloud, VMware, and Dell, HPE and Cisco

While large cloud providers are adding more to their stacks with artificial intelligence as a differentiator, there is still a market for managing multiple cloud providers. This group of cloud players used to focus on hybrid architectures, linking data centers to public **** service providers, but is now aiming to become an infrastructure management plane.

Kentik's research highlights that the most common cloud combinations are AWS and Azure, but there are also customers working in Google Cloud Platform. Ninety-seven percent of respondents said their companies use AWS, but 35 percent said they also actively use Azure, according to Kentik's survey. Twenty-four percent use AWS and Google Cloud Platform together.

IBM

Annual as-a-service operating rate: 117 billion

IBM's cloud strategy and its AI approach have a lot of **** in common. Big Blue's plan is to enable clients to manage multiple systems, services, and providers and to be the management console. IBM wants to be part of your cloud environment and help you run it. In 2018, IBM launched OpenScale for AI, which is designed to manage multiple AI tools that may be offered by major cloud providers. IBM also introduced multi-cloud tools. Think of IBM as the Switzerland of cloud adoption and computing services strategies.

The move by organizations to adopt multiple public **** cloud providers is interesting and justifies IBM's acquisition of Red Hat for $34 billion. IBM has its own public **** cloud and will offer everything from platform-as-a-service to analytics to Watson and even quantum computing, but most importantly Big Blue and Red Hat could make it a leading cloud management player. For its part, IBM is taking its core intellectual property - Watson, AI management, cloud integration - and delivering it across multiple clouds.

The Red Hat acquisition is IBM's bet on farm migration. It remains to be seen how the IBM and Red Hat cultures will mesh together. On the bright side, the two companies have been hybrid cloud partners for years.

For its part, Red Hat developed the Kubernetes game with OpenShift. It also continues to work with the hybrid cloud ecosystem, including Microsoft Azure. Microsoft CEO Nadella even attended the Red Hat Summit.

In fact, IBM CFO James Kavanaugh reiterated Red Hat's reasoning on the company's Q4 earnings call, noting that the blue giant is seeing more deals for IBM Cloud Private and its "hybrid open" cloud environment. Kavanaugh added:

Let me pause for a moment and remind you of the value we're seeing from the combination of IBM and Red Hat, which is all about accelerating hybrid cloud adoption. Customer response to the announcement has been very positive. They understand the power of this acquisition and the combination of IBM and Red Hat capabilities to help them move beyond their initial cloud efforts and truly move their business applications to the cloud. They are concerned about secure portability of data and workloads across cloud environments, consistency of management and security protocols across clouds and avoiding vendor lock-in. They understand how the combination of IBM and Red Hat will help them address these issues.

IBM's Q4 service revenue operating rate was $12.2 billion, making it a strong cloud provider, but not on par with AWS and Azure today. It's likely that the strategies of all the big cloud providers will eventually converge.

The new hybrid and multi-cloud landscape could be one of the key things to watch in the cloud wars in 2019.

Here are some of the key players to consider:

VMware:

It's part of Dell's technology portfolio, and for many years it owned traditional data centers. The company became a virtualization vendor and then adopted everything from containers to OpenStack. Perhaps the best move for VMware is to work closely with AWS. This hybrid cloud partnership is a win-win for both parties, and both companies are on a roll. The partnership is so interesting that VMware is helping to bring AWS to the field. With wit:

Pat Gelsinger: Dell is a fan of the VMware-AWS partnership

AWS Outposts delivers AWS cloud hardware locally

VMWare gets Heptio in enterprise Kubernetes adoption push

VMware touts multicloud with expanded s hybrid cloud portfolio to tout a multi-cloud strategy

Of course, VMware also has vRealize Suite, vCloud Air, VMware HCX, Cloud Management Platform, vSphere and networking products.

Dell Technologies and HPE:

Both vendors have multiple products to run data centers and are plugging into cloud providers.

Dell EMC updated its portfolio to help organizations avoid "cloud silos."

HPE launched Composable Cloud as it moves deeper into its hybrid cloud strategy

HPE's plan boils down to a multi-cloud hybrid infrastructure that scales to the edge. .

Dell Technologies, however, has had the most success in the hybrid space. Dell Technologies used its annual customer conference to outline its Dell Cloud Platform and how it integrates various parts of its portfolio. The result is that VMware, which is majority owned by Dell Technologies, will be the glue between its products and services. The effort provides Dell Technologies with a more integrated approach to cloud computing that can connect private, local and public **** computing resources.

Cisco

Cisco then built a sizable software portfolio through acquisitions. Cisco outlined a data center where any vision revolves around plugging its application-centric infrastructure (ACI) into multiple clouds. No matter how you slice the hybrid cloud game, the end state is the same: multiple providers and private infrastructures seamlessly connected. Cisco has also partnered with Google Cloud. Kubernetes, Istio, and Apigee are the glue that holds the Cisco-Google effort together.

While the hybrid cloud market is widely outgrown as traditional vendors open up new ways to sell hardware, the new multicloud world is gaining even more acceptance among former upstarts who want to turn the likes of IBM, VMware, Dell, and HPE into dinosaurs.

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