IBM Extends Red Hat OpenShift Alliance with Samsung
IBM and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd today announced they will extend their existing alliance into the realms of edge computing, 5G, hybrid cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) that at its foundation will have instances of the Red Hat OpenShift application development and deployment platform based on Kubernetes.
Under the terms of the agreement, IBM and Samsung will collaborate on a variety of Industry 4.0 solutions on behalf of customers that will run on Samsung Galaxy 5G mobile devices connected to a private 5G wireless network operated by Samsung and its partners. Those offerings span a variety of indoor and outdoor wireless networking platforms spanning C-Band, CBRS and local 5G spectrum and mmWave, a networking platform that can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud.
In addition to the Red Hat OpenShift instances to build and deploy those applications, IBM will provide the network management platform and AI technologies required to automate the end-to-end environment.
Marisa Viveros, head of strategy and offerings for global telecommunications and the media and entertainment industry at IBM, says this latest effort builds on an exiting relationship between Samsung and Red Hat, which IBM acquired for $34 billion last year. Earlier this year Samsung also launched an initiative with IBM, the Singapore Infocomm Media Development Authority and M1, a telecommunications carrier to advance smart factory deployment involving 5G, AI, analytics and augmented reality (AR) technologies.
The two companies will also combine their respective expertise to ensure these application environments are secure, adds Viveros.
Wiht most enterprise IT organizations having launched several digital business transformation initiatives, the appetite for emerging technologies that will further advance those projects is increasing, says Viveros.
IBM and Samsung are clearly trying to foster the development of an ecosystem around 5G wireless networking technologies that are just now starting to be employed by enterprise IT organizations. Most of the applications being deployed across those networks will be based on microservices constructed using containers. IBM earlier this year also launched IBM Satellite, which makes it easier to clone and manage instances of Kubernetes clusters running those applications. As those applications are built, IBM sees an opportunity to encourage software developers to embed AI capabilities using machine and deep learning algorithms within those application environments.
It’s too early to say to what degree organizations will rely on IBM and its partners to build and deploy these applications. Most organizations today don’t have the skills required to master edge computing, 5G, hybrid cloud computing and AI, so Viveros says IBM anticipates there will be a lot of demand for its consulting expertise.
IBM in either scenario is positioning itself to either build or manage those applications or simply provide the infrastructure on which they would be deployed. Regardless of that path chosen, the number of container applications spanning cloud and edge computing platforms is about to exponentially increase.
