Watch: Bob Lord on Red Hat in the IBM ecosystem, growing partnerships with Indian GSIs

Armonk, New York headquartered technology giant IBM has been busy over the past few weeks with acquisitions, people, patents and partnerships.

The company has made significant investments the past year to drive growth. It spun off its information technology (IT) infrastructure unit, temporarily dubbed NewCo, which will focus on managed infrastructure business. With the restructuring, IBM can focus on the hybrid cloud market and AI (artificial intelligence) solutions.

An important part of this growth plan that CEO Arvind Krishna has set out for IBM is expanding and strengthening the partner ecosystem globally, a task which is the responsibility of Bob Lord, the  current senior vice president, worldwide ecosystems and blockchain at IBM. 

Lord, who is an IBM veteran and is also Big Blue’s first chief digital officer, now takes care of the company’s work with business partners and independent software vendors.

In August last year IBM committed to $1 billion into the cloud ecosystem for the next three years.  While IBM relies on the ecosystem to scale and innovate, partners in turn count on the technology giant to bring new technologies and industry expertise into the market.

IBM has been extending its long term partnerships with its Indian GSIs (global systems integrators) utilising its trump card, the Red Hat OpenShift. It is also betting heavy on the financial services cloud and the telecommunications cloud to propel growth.

Some of the GSIs it has partnered with over the past few months include Infosys, Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Tech Mahindra, HCL Technologies, and Persistent Systems.

In an interview with TechCircle, Lord outlined the importance of Red Hat OpenShift in creating a stronger partner ecosystem, the importance of the GSI ecosystem in India, IBM CloudPak --  an important cog in the wheel for modernization initiatives -- and future plans.

Lord also spoke about blockchain and where he thinks the technology is headed, along with the importance of Kubernetes and the financial and telecommunication cloud services of the organisation.

For the fourth quarter of financial year 2019-20, its revenues from cloud increased 10% year-on-year to $7.5 million, while the revenue from its hybrid cloud platform Red Hat alone increased 19% for the same period.