IBM wants to manage your cloud services no matter which ones you run

IBM has rolled out a multi-cloud management system that promises to help customers manage, move and integrate apps across multivendor cloud infrastructures. IBM’s new Kubernetes-based Multi-cloud Manager runs on the company’s year-old IBM Cloud Private platform but lets customers manage and integrate workloads on clouds from other providers such as Amazon, Red Hat and Microsoft. That means better automation, quicker spin-up of services, and better pricing when using the IBM platform, said IBM’s Robin Hernandez, director of IBM Private Cloud Offering Management. Hernandez says at the heart of the Multi-cloud Manager is a dashboard interface for managing thousands of Kubernetes applications and huge volumes of data regardless of where in the organization they are located. The idea is that if a company uses one cloud for its AI services, uses another for its inventory and supply chain, and runs its financial and customer data its own on-premises systems, Multi-cloud Manager lets operations and development teams get visibility of Kubernetes applications and components across the different clouds and clusters via a single control pane. Such a multi-cloud environment gets complicated and hard to manage quickly. Hernandez cited IBM’s own Institute for Business Value research pointing out that  85 percent of companies are using more than one cloud environment. During a keynote address at Gartner’s Symposium/ITxpo this week, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said IBM's clients have an average of six cloud deployments and 1,000 apps.