IBM is beefing up its automated tools and services for moving applications to multiple clouds.

Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading

November 16, 2018

3 Min Read
IBM Revs 'Cloud Factory' for Migration Automation

IBM is enhancing its "Cloud Factory" tools to automate migrating legacy applications to multiple clouds, speeding up the time to convert existing applications to microservices for improved agility and scalability.

The new software, announced Friday, automates much of the process of analyzing workloads, mapping out APIs, and rewriting software to make it suitable to run on IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM)'s own cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba, with private cloud support in partnership with Red Hat's OpenShift Kubernetes container platform, IBM distinguished engineer Bill Brown tells Light Reading.

IBM's goal is to help enterprises both migrate to the cloud and modernize applications into microservices components. Modernizing can help improve scalability, speed up upgrades and maintenance, and rewrite applications written in older languages, such as Assembler and Cobol, where it's hard to find programmers conversant in the software, Brown says.

Modernization into microservices makes it easier to rewrite the user interface to support a variety of platforms, including desktop and mobile, and reduces outages, Brown says.

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Additionally, IBM is extending its partnership with ServiceNow to help enterprises manage IT resources across multiple clouds.

Multicloud is behind IBM's planned $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT), announced last month. IBM wants to enhance its position as a trusted broker helping enterprises move applications to Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM's own cloud, and SaaS providers. (See IBM-Red Hat: A Crazy Plan That Might Work, How Red Hat Could Give IBM's Telco Strategy a New Lease of Life and Is IBM Late to the Multicloud Party?.)

IBM has a lot of competition in that strategy from just about every major public cloud and enterprise provider, including Amazon, Cisco, Microsoft, Dell, VMware and Google. (See Cisco & Amazon Bring Public Cloud On-Prem, VMware Buys CloudHealth for Multicloud Ops, Top 5 Drivers for Multicloud, Dell CTO Expounds 'Insane' Theory About Enterprise Complexity, Dell CTO: Public Cloud Is 'Way More Expensive Than Buying From Us', Google Debuts On-Prem Kubernetes Server, Cisco & Google's Kubernetes Partnership Could Deliver in October and Google Launches Cloud Services Platform, a Toolkit for Kubernetes & Serverless Apps.)

— Mitch Wagner Follow me on Twitter Visit my LinkedIn profile Visit me on Tumblr Follow me on Facebook Executive Editor, Light Reading

About the Author(s)

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

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