Cloud Paks allow clients to easily move to the cloud: IBM's Natarajan

IBM is looking to push its Cloud Pak offering as an integral part of its hybrid cloud strategy. In its December quarter earnings, the technology major recorded total cloud revenue of $7.5 billion, a growth of 10 per cent annually. Overall, in 2020, its total cloud revenue was $25.1 billion, up by 19 per cent. As part of its larger strategy on cloud, which it believes requires businesses to invest in hybrid multicloud platform strategies and capabilities, it is pushing its Cloud Paks. SUBRAM NATARAJAN, Director and CTO, Technical Sales, IBM Technology Sales, India/South Asia, tells Neha Alawadhi the broad contours of how Cloud Paks will help Indian enterprises. Edited excerpts:

What is a hybrid cloud and how is it different from public cloud and private cloud?

A hybrid cloud integrates public and private cloud infrastructures. In this model, the two types of cloud can be joined together into a single, completely interoperable, flexible infrastructure, and the enterprise can choose the optimal cloud environment for each individual application or workload.

A hybrid cloud can enable an ideal division of workloads — an enterprise can keep sensitive data and applications that can’t easily be migrated to the cloud in its on-premises data centre, while using the public cloud for access to software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and any additional platform, storage, or compute capacity it might need. It’s this “best-of-both-worlds” approach that allows organisations to derive the technical benefits of cloud-native deployments while driving the cost and flexibility advantage.

What are Cloud Paks and why are they important for IBM?

Customers want to develop once and deploy anywhere at any time. And that’s precisely what we have done through our hybrid cloud. Our strategy around hybrid cloud is centered around two key product areas — Red Hat and IBM software — and the second is how people started consuming cloud. We had to definitely make that easy. Cloud Paks essentially allow customers to easily onboard onto the cloud depending on the vantage points, plan and adopt cloud, and on an ongoing basis run this for what we call day-two operations.

How does the Indian scenario on hybrid cloud look right now, and how has the perception or acceptance of hybrid cloud changed because of Covid-19-related lockdowns?

We see that only 20 per cent of the workloads have moved to the public cloud, which as a concept and technology have been in existence in the past decade. The pandemic has given a jolt to everyone, making them go digital, and on cloud. Without that there is no survival. The best way to get out to the hybrid cloud platform — the best way to get onto a cloud platform — is through hybrid means.

Customers in India currently have about 17 per cent of their information technology spend allocated to the cloud, and they’re planning to increase the share spend to about 49 per cent by 2023. Now, that clearly showcases that organisations in India are ready to spend nearly half of their entire cloud budget on hybrid over the next three years.

How has your strategy changed with respect to how you take your cloud offering to your customers?

As customers are beginning to embark on the cloud platform, there are multiple challenges. Firstly, they need to build cloud-native applications. And in case the applications are existing ones, they need to get modernised to support the cloud environments. Therefore, you need an open interoperable platform. And the collection of open-source and proprietary software is offered as part of Cloud Pak. When we give this to customers, they find everything that they need comprehensively to undertake their journey towards the cloud, focusing on the areas that they are targeting, whether it is data-related, security-related, or application-related, and so on.

We also have collaborations with the technology ecosystem, and this has been an integral part of IBM’s growth strategy. And many of our system integrator/ independent software vendor partners are leveraging Cloud Paks today to help modernise workloads, with Red Hat, OpenShift and cloud environment. For example, TCS, Persistent Systems, and Tech Mahindra — all of them have been using Cloud Paks for addressing their complex problems.