Expanding Value of IBM Cloud Private: Exploding additional portfolio of software in the Platform

In my paper introducing IBM Cloud Private for Data, I made the point that the creation of a platform that supports Containers and Kubernetes allows us to build upon that platform new capabilities that you can run in your data center, behind your firewall, on your systems. Moreover, in that paper, I introduced you to cutting edge, extremely high computing performance capabilities that are made possible by the very nature of a Kubernetes environment. In this paper, I expand upon that concept to give you an ever-evolving roadmap of further value you can accrue from IBM Cloud Private (ICP) as a foundational platform upon which to do cloud computing. As of the writing of this article, we are bringing to market the following capabilities on the platform:

• We recently introduced Blockchain on ICP.
• Some Watson services are now offered on ICP.
• IBM middleware has now been containerized and added to the ICP catalogue, and this will continue to increase in the next coming months and quarters.
• The IBM Digital Business Automation Platform now runs on ICP.
• Also, as more and more IBM software is being containerized it will also be added to that catalogue.

If you consider that ICP was initially introduced a little more than a year ago, this rate of evolution is genuinely exponential when compared to previous enterprise-grade computing platforms. This ability to explode in growth and bring to market additional capabilities composed of the software that runs many organizations' IT backbones today, in container formats, is demonstrative of what I wrote about when I explained that everyone, especially non-technical executives need to understand why containers are a game changer:

• All because containers are the building blocks of the digital economy and digital speed competition.
• Therefore, If I were to write this article six month to a year from now, the list would be much longer and it would be made up chiefly of non-IBM content in the ICP Catalogue containing your and third-party applications.

From this perspective, this is a genuinely differentiated value from IBM because the Platform becomes a framework for far more than just Cloud-Native Application Development and IT Operations related computing. The platform becomes a gateway and enabler of competitive business advantage. By leveraging the attributes of containers and Kubernetes, this type of computing will allow you to perform business functions much faster, respond more quickly to market opportunities and perils, govern all this computing within a central, highly managed and secure framework. The Platform will also allow you to make strategic choices where you deploy workloads whether some of those remain strictly in the safety of your computing environment behind your firewall or whether you deploy some or all your workloads to the public cloud or a combination thereof, which we define as Hybrid Cloud Computing.

Thank you for your time

This article was written in collaboration with Christopher Smallwood