Hillery Hunter @HilleryHunter, CTO and Vice President, Cloud Infrastructure, IBM sits down with Peter Burris for IBM Innovation Day at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. #think2019 #theCUBE #IBM https://siliconangle.com/2019/01/04/bridging-multicloud-gap-open-source-think2019-womenintech/ Bridging the multicloud gap with open source Cloud technologies are advancing at full tilt with the aid of machine learning tools and open-source learnings, and new companies born in the cloud era are quick to optimize for an increasingly digital market. But although cloud-native organizations enjoy these advantages seamlessly, legacy businesses continue to struggle through the replatforming challenges inhibiting cloud benefits. The emergence of multicloud offers a more efficient option than lift-and-shift migration, but the path to hybrid modernization remains under construction for most cloud providers still building their own enterprise solutions. With the experience of both a legacy tech enterprise and emerging cloud provider, IBM Corp. is adopting an open-source approach to guiding customers on their digital transformation journey. “I’m focused on making our cloud the best possible place for people to bring their data, their applications, and come into that modernization journey with us,” said Hillery Hunter (pictured), chief technology officer and vice president of cloud infrastructure at IBM. With her years of experience at IBM, Hunter is weaving new partner tools with established IBM technology to help customers transform business processes for a market that continues to scale up. Hunter spoke with Peter Burris, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent IBM Innovation Day event in Yorktown Heights, New York. (* Disclosure below.) This week, theCUBE spotlights Hillery Hunter in its Women in Tech feature. A new cloud era According to Hunter, global data is anticipated to exceed 44 zettabytes by 2020. To help enterprise customers get their arms around this astronomical volume of information and maximize its value, IBM is combining its strengths in artificial intelligence and compute with newly acquired open-source tools, courtesy of Red Hat Inc., to foster innovation through the organization’s collaborative opportunity. The $34-billion Red Hat Inc. procurement last October gave IBM a direct line to the open-source community and marked a significant shift from the IT company’s legacy processes to that of a modern digital landscape. “At the IBM research facility, we can take the latest innovations that help us accomplish great AI insights and microservice integration capabilities into open source and work there collaboratively with people across the industry,” Hunter said. The partnership provides a rapid integration of unprecedented software capabilities for IBM customers through newly available microservices offerings and a new opportunity to realize the potential of big data through more comprehensive analysis and insights. “When you move to cloud, you’re modernizing your overall workload and bringing it into this era where you’re able to apply microservices and cloud-based programming methodology [and] bring the latest of software capability to your data,” she said. ‘The world is hybrid’ The Red Hat partnership is founded on shared principles around the value and practice of open source, with IBM’s open-source support dating back decades to its early support of Linux and creation of the Linux Technology Center. Red Hat’s open-source market influence, common values of customer attention, and high standards for product and security make it ripe for IBM integration, according to Hunter. “We have a shared understanding of the value of open-source and the value of rate and pace of innovation that’s commensurate with what open-source provides — as well as then moving that into an enterprise context,” she said. In today’s enterprise market, that context is multicloud. IBM sees more thorough modernization by bringing cloud methodologies to legacy processes, instead of dragging customers through the trials of migration that may not even leave their data in its most productive environment. “The world is hybrid, meaning that there is data and cloud function needed on-premises and in public clouds. There’s a need for private, dedicated environments in the public cloud as well,” Hunter said. ... Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Innovation Day event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Innovation Day event. Neither IBM, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)