IBM and AWS: Accelerate your journey to the AWS Cloud with IBM solutions and consulting experts

IBM AWS partnership

Enterprises are increasingly looking to accelerate their enterprise cloud adoption and hybrid cloud journey. IBM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are strategically collaborating to bring leading technologies and expertise on AWS through a unique combination of IBM Consulting, Software, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) capabilities.

To accelerate hybrid cloud transformations, IBM developers, architects, product specialists, and our partner ecosystem together developed a broad collection of overview content and deep technical content that enables developers and architects to get an understanding of IBM Software and SaaS offerings.

This blog provides an overview of how you can navigate this collection of technical content, based on the business or technology problems you are facing. This technical content gives you an understanding of IBM’s strategy across several categories, including Data and AI, Automation, Sustainability, Security, and Modernization.

At the end of this blog, you should be able to navigate the breadth and depth of content on the IBM Developer site and understand which content to review to support your needs. You should also be able to dive deeper to learn how to build an architecture to support your business requirements with IBM on AWS, design a well-architected solution on AWS with example reference architectures, accelerate onboarding with orchestration templates, integrate with AWS services, or get a broader understanding of our product use cases and features to help you to accelerate your enterprise cloud adoption and hybrid cloud journey on AWS.

Additionally, the content lets you identify solutions that can help you accelerate or achieve your business objectives with product use cases, technical demonstrations, deep reference architectures, solution patterns, and code samples. The content will continue to grow with support from our partner ecosystem, and we welcome you to reach out to your IBM representative to provide feedback, so we can incorporate the technical content that will help you as a developer on AWS.

IBM hybrid cloud strategy

IBM’s strategy is hybrid cloud. We support our customers by providing systems, software, and services to enable customers across public, private, on-premises, and edge-based environments. To enable these customers, we must have an architectural foundation that enables our hybrid cloud strategy. That foundation is Red Hat (an IBM Company) and Red Hat OpenShift, an enterprise cloud and container management platform that enables customers to “build once, deploy anywhere.” For years, Red Hat and AWS have been partnering by enabling customers to achieve modernization and cloud transformation through facilitating and accelerating deployment and integration of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP), Ansible, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on AWS.

In 2021, to accelerate cloud modernization of enterprise organizations, Red Hat and AWS jointly launched an AWS Service, Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA). This native AWS service is a Red Hat fully managed OpenShift platform on AWS, jointly supported by Red Hat and AWS. Since this launch, Red Hat and AWS have seen considerable client adoption of ROSA and demand for IBM Software on AWS. ROSA integrates with over 170 AWS services, and is managed directly from the AWS console.

With our architectural foundation, Red Hat OpenShift on AWS, IBM listened to our customers over the last 18 months and brought together over 50 product listings on the AWS Marketplace, and over 48 unique IBM Software and SaaS products on AWS available for purchase directly from IBM.

At IBM Think 2022, IBM announced a strategic collaboration with AWS and a commitment to bring IBM Software and Software-as-a-Service to AWS and the AWS Marketplace.

Today, at AWS re:Invent 2022, IBM reviewed our progress on this strategic collaboration, highlighting these AWS Marketplace offerings as well as our IBM Software and IBM SaaS portfolio on AWS.

The rest of this blog outlines the IBM Software and SaaS portfolio on AWS for several categories: Data and AI, Automation, Sustainability, Security, and Modernization. To dive deeper, these categories have blog posts that articulate the product portfolio on AWS, deep technical architecture articles, and video demonstrations (many embedded in articles) that showcase some of the value of IBM Software on AWS.

Supporting enterprise and partner developers

Across our customer community and partner ecosystem, we see a significant amount of demand around our IBM AWS partnership. Each customer has different types of technology that they focus on, and approaches to design and build architectures vary based on their objectives. The content that this series represents is principally focused on helping an enterprise developer in a company identify how to navigate and how to design and build an architecture on AWS with IBM Software products and features to enable their business or end customers.

While enterprise developers are the primary target, we also see an increasing demand from independent software vendors (ISV) and global system integrators (GSI), who are IBM ISV build partners, and who are interested in embedding, integrating, or building on top of IBM on AWS. These developers are a critical audience because they will drive feedback into our product portfolio and enable IBM to innovate on behalf of our customers.

As you navigate through this blog, I have incorporated some clarity on how you can use this type of technology, depending on the type of developer you are and which category of business you support. If you are an enterprise developer, in this series you will understand how to use our technology to support your business and for your end customers. If you are an IBM build partner, you can learn ways to better embed, integrate, private-label our offerings, and partner with IBM to accelerate your go-to-market strategy with IBM on AWS.

Unlock the power of your data with IBM Data and AI

Data and analytics have changed enterprise companies drastically in the last few years. New trends require organizations to build or acquire hybrid products that can accelerate machine learning model development and production deployment, content generation, and virtual human assistance for improved trust.

Within IBM Data and AI on AWS, we support a broad set of developers across a few key categories.

At the top of our IBM Data and AI stack, we have our data applications category of software and SaaS products that enables developers that have limited machine learning knowledge to easily adopt and integrate machine learning into their organizations.

Next, within the middle of our IBM Data and AI stack, we have our data fabric category, which focuses on helping both data scientists and data stewards build end-to-end lifecycle management for data operations and machine learning development. These products allow customers to achieve data integration, governance, and insights. Typically, hands-on machine learning developers use this stack to design, build, extend, and release machine learning models to production.

Finally, at the bottom of our stack, we have our data store and workload category, to enable data engineers, researchers, and academics by providing data management, high-performance computing, and large machine learning model products.

Learn more about IBM Data and AI on AWS.

Across all of these categories, we are seeing a shift in how organizations are consuming our technology. As mentioned previously, ISVs, GSIs, and customers are starting to offer other businesses products that they develop, and to remain competitive within enterprise software, they must rapidly integrate industry-leading and trusted solutions.

We have worked closely with our IBM ISV organization to expand our offerings to enable our data insights products to be directly embeddable as part of a software product. A good example of this is with our IBM Watson brand of products.

IBM Watson Libraries is a common library framework for natural language processing (NLP), speech, document understanding, translation, and trust that is designed for developers to embed AI into their products. Watson NLP makes it easy to deploy NLP capabilities anywhere: on-prem, on devices, or with any hyperscalers like AWS. IBM build partners can embed this or other IBM software offerings, and develop a partnership with IBM on AWS to enhance their features, optimize their solutions, and embed or integrate IBM into their product. This blog describes how you can easily deploy trained models from Watson NLP on an AWS Fargate environment, which makes the MLOps process flexible and portable.

Unleash new levels of performance faster with IBM Automation

Leveraging intelligent automation can enable enterprise organizations to accelerate their digital transformations, moving repetitive and critical business tasks from humans to AI-powered solutions. IBM Automation enables customers by providing software and SaaS solutions to simplify application integration, accelerate application development, automate tasks, streamline workflows, and improve business and technology operations.

Application developers can drive change, reduce costs, and minimize risk with integration. With these offerings, companies can build web applications and leverage API management, application integration, event streaming, enterprise messaging, high-speed data transfer, and end-to-end security.

Developers can automate critical and mundane business functions with AI-infused apps with business automation. With these offerings, companies can automate assignment of tasks to bots with low-code tools, save time and improve client experiences with cloud-native content management services, and accelerate informed decision-making through data-driven insights.

Developers can discover proactive, continuous application performance, and enable exceptional client experiences with every touch with IT automation. With these offerings, companies can achieve broad and deep observability of their cloud infrastructure and applications, achieve faster decision-making and smarter resource allocation, and enhance their client experiences with proactive AI-powered IT operations.

Learn more about IBM Automation on AWS.

Make your cloud secure by design with IBM Security

Security is the foundation for an enterprise architecture. Establishing this foundation when adopting cloud technologies is critical to organizations across all industries. IBM Security Software and SaaS solutions on AWS help customers make their cloud secure by design. IBM Security has multiple facets on cloud.

• With extended threat detection and response, we help customers collect insights, and predict, prevent, and respond to modern threats across a broad set of AWS services.
• With data security and compliance, we help customers protect data across AWS and hybrid cloud environments within AWS data sources.
• Within identity and access management (IAM), we help secure remote workers and consumers through single-sign-on and authentication and authorization.
• With fraud detection and prevention, we help mitigate account takeover attempts.

Learn more about IBM Security on AWS.

Turn sustainability ambition into action with IBM Sustainability

Greenhouse gas emissions are at an all-time high according to an International Energy Agency (IEA) analysis released on March 8, 2022. Sustainability in business refers to a company's strategy to reduce negative environmental impact resulting from their operations in a particular market. An organization’s sustainability practices are typically analyzed against environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics. IBM Sustainability provides intelligent asset management, ESG data management and reporting, and green IT to help organizations turn sustainability ambition into action.

• Intelligent asset management helps customers create a lower-emissions business and use automation to track resource usage, reduce costs, and improve asset performance.
• ESG data management and reporting is about bringing together siloed data from across your organization into a single system of record to inform decision-making and streamline reporting.
• Green IT is focused on building a responsible computing platform with cloud and AI to virtualize, consolidate, and optimize workloads.

Learn more about IBM Sustainability on AWS

Modernize to fuel growth and innovation with IBM Modernization

Achieving new business models and innovating on behalf of your customers requires enterprise developers to accelerate modernization efforts with new innovative tools. IBM modernization solutions enable customers to modernize how applications, people, and systems interact with one another. Within the IBM Modernization portfolio, this comes in two categories: software products that accelerate mainframe application modernization and software-defined storage (SDS) products.

Mainframe application modernization lets software developers embrace cloud-native development standards, languages, tools, and AWS Services to accelerate DevOps and mainframe development on AWS. These offerings enable customers to securely link AWS to on-premises infrastructure for low-latency connectivity. Doing so enables customers to digitally transform by building APIs on AWS connected to mainframe on-premises in minutes, developing and testing new cloud-native applications with modern programming languages on AWS, refactoring legacy applications and mainframe code, analyzing application dependencies for application modernization, and orchestrating mainframe resources with infrastructure as code powered by Red Hat Ansible.

Storage solutions enable customers to adopt scalable, resilient, hybrid data platform and disaster recovery use cases on top of AWS. Customers can build robust data platforms that are optimized for AI and big data on AWS with IBM Spectrum Scale. Customers can achieve hybrid data replication and migration between on-premises, public cloud, and AWS environments with IBM Spectrum Virtualize.

Learn more about IBM Mainframe Application Modernization on AWS.

Summary

This blog outlined a broad set of capabilities that developers can leverage to support their cloud adoption, modernization, and transformation journey. Developers interested in learning more about the categories and use cases that are critical to their business can navigate to the previous sections, and click the links that are most appropriate to solving their business problems. For technical content that you need a deeper dive into, you can navigate to IBM Documentation to learn more about a specific product represented to get the latest insights into product features, architectural patterns, or AWS service integrations.

For more insights around the overall partnership, see the IBM AWS partnership page to learn more, or speak with your IBM representative to connect to an IBM architect specializing in IBM technology on AWS.