IBM says over 100 of its key software offerings will now run on any cloud – from Alibaba to Azure, Google Cloud Platform to AWS – as it reveals the results of a major integration effort with newly acquired Red Hat.

Just three weeks after closing the $34 billion acquisition, Big Blue’s big reveal is the release of IBM Cloud Paks: the wholesale containerisation of IBM software that plugs into Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (Paas).

The end result: users can run most IBM software like database management tool DB2, or machine learning platform Watson Studio (even some mainframe applications) pretty much anywhere that OpenShift runs.

Use of the new features will reduce development time by up to 84 percent and operational expenses by up to 75 percent, IBM claims.

Read this: Red Hat OpenShift 4: Automated Updates, Jenkins Integrations and More

IBM said: “This is the software that keeps the world’s largest systems moving – from ATMs to flight control instruments – and is trusted by 96 of the Top 100 global banks, nine of the top 10 car brands and eight of the world’s Top 10 airlines.

“Enterprises don’t want to build on a proprietary stack alone.  That’s why the launch of IBM Cloud Paks on Red Hat is so powerful – it enables enterprises to expedite the shift of their core business apps to the cloud in a secure and consistent way.”

IBM Cloud Paks: Pick Your Cloud 

The company said it is also rolling out support for OpenShift on IBM Systems, including plans for IBM Z and LinuxONE mainframes.

Bala Rajaraman, IBM Fellow and CTO for IBM Cloud Platform Services told Computer Business Review: “What cloud brings to the table is easy consumption of related pieces of software. So Cloud Paks are not really products; they’re capabilities.

“Containerisation is easy.  Bringing it into a Kubernetes platform with all of the orchestration capabilities, whether it’s scaling it, or whether it is finding the right place to play, is hard. It’s not just about packaging software into a little container, it’s about how you bring it into an orchestrated, multi-container, scalable environment that gives you not just deployment benefits but operational benefits.

“This really has the ability to accelerate where enterprises are going to play: the rhetoric here around the marketing is actually true; to me as a technical guy, that’s always a great thing.”

He added: “Enterprises want a large software ecosystem running on a common platform; think of the Internet as an analogy. This has the potential to really make that happen. Hybrid cloud, multicloud are a focal area for innovation: how do you place workloads? With the emergence of things like 5G, moving AI to the edge; IoT processing at the edge. The platform and the middleware (from applications to databases); those two layers coming to together is really going to accelerate innovation.”

The company is revealing five Cloud Paks:

  • Cloud Pak for Applications includes newly containerised IBM Application Navigator, IBM WebSphere Liberty, Open Liberty
  • Cloud Pak for Automation includes newly containerised IBM Business Automation Content Analyser, IBM Business Automation Insights
  • Cloud Pak for Data includes newly containerised IBM Watson Machine Learning, IBM Watson Studio, IBM Db2 Warehouse
  • Cloud Pak for Integration includes newly containerised IBM API Connect, IBM MQ
  • Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management includes newly containerised IBM Cloud App Management, IBM Cloud Automation Manager

The news comes two weeks after IBM open sourced three Kubernetes projects that aim to make it easier to develop and deploy applications in the cloud using the container orchestration tool.

Read this: IBM Open Sources 3 Kubernetes Projects: Launches ML Dataset Hub