IBM Open Technology Group

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Article from ADMIN 57/2020

By Mayank Sharma

Director of the IBM Open Technology group Nimesh Bhatia shares details about the company's involvement in open source and how its latest acquisition of Red Hat compliments its existing endeavors in the cloud.

Red Hat's acquisition by IBM was surprising to many, not only because of the economics of the transaction, but also because it propels Big Blue into position as a leading contender in the open source cloud landscape. But it doesn't come as a surprise to Nimesh Bhatia who is the Program Director in the Open Technology group at IBM where he heads a team that contributes to many open source projects. Nimesh tells us how the company engages with open source and how the acquisition fits nicely into IBM's cloud and container-centric efforts.

ADMIN: How is IBM engaging with open source?

Nimesh Bhatia: IBM has a long history of contributing to open source projects, and we engage with open source in three different ways. One, we are engaging with various open source communities in terms of joining the foundations and contributing there. We are the biggest open source contributor, if you combine all of our code contributions to open source. We have various teams who are contributing code, participating as leaders in those communities, and bringing enterprise use cases to these communities. That's the second aspect. We bring enterprise requirements and enterprise needs to the open source projects. When we go and talk to our customers and they share the areas they are focusing on and say they have a need for security or performance improvement or certain integration between two technologies, for example, we bring those requirements to the open source communities. We dedicate our engineering teams to solving those use cases and producing code in an open way. And the third aspect is we are helping developers. When we go and talk to our customers, 94% of our customers are saying that they deploy the workloads on multiple clouds. So when you are deploying applications on multiple clouds, you need to have a certain level of conformance of the APIs. You have to have the testing done for various platforms, etc.

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