Open Source has been among the key vectors for digital transformation — enabling developers to collaborate on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) projects and introduce transparency in emerging technologies. Red Hat, the poster child of open source business became a dominant vendor for enterprise Linux and the storied $34 billion IBM buyout in 2019 helped Big Blue reposition itself as a major contender in the hybrid multi-cloud space.
In an interview with Toolbox, Christopher FerrisOpens a new window , CTO Open Technology, IBM, talks how Red Hat acquisition gives IBM a broader reach in the hybrid multi-cloud platform, reinforces IBM’s commitment to open source and why open source is staring at a bright future. Ferris also tells why companies are using open source programs to attract engineering talent, and how the C-Suite has opened up to open source projects.
Key Takeaways From This Tech Talk Interview:
- IBM’s reliance on open source to deliver cloud-based solutions
- Companies’ changing attitude towards open source projects
- Why more tech projects in the future will be open source
- Emerging challenges in the technology industry
Here’s the edited transcript of the interview with Chris Ferris:
You have been a pioneer in open source, being actively engaged in open source development since 1999. How did you position Big Blue’s approach to open source technology?
I joined IBM in 2002 and I was hired by the Open Tech team to help transition IBM to become much more open. Throughout that time, I have been involved in both open source and open standards initiatives, both in international standards and industry standards and in various communities such as Apache and Linux Foundation. I think what had the most impact was when IBM was exploring getting into these emerging areas of virtualization to try to convince the engineering teams that the best approach to doing this was to truly embrace open source. That proved to be pretty successful and I think that success truly tended to feed on itself and that’s why we are at where we are today.
Learn more: Microsoft, Google Go Native for Open-Source App DevelopmentOpens a new window
How did the Red Hat acquisition help IBM consolidate its position in open source and bolster IBM’s hybrid cloud business? As an aside, how has Red Hat changed IBM’s position towards open source?
I think that the Red Hat acquisition was a realization that innovation is really being done out in the open now. Increasingly, a lot of the technology that we will be adopting in the next decade or so will be developed in open source.
I don’t think that the acquisitionOpens a new window consolidates IBM’s position in open source as we have a strong history in supporting and contributing to open source, going back more than 20-25 years. We have been working side by side with engineers from RedHat and many other companies. We are seeing two organizations complement one another — Red Hat with its upstream first approach to everything they deliver as an offering and IBM’s approach where we take open source and deliver services and solutions based on that technology. I think that it’s really helped the broader community, beyond just the open source community, to appreciate the investment in open source that IBM has made all of these years and it has given people a reason to look at IBM with a different lens.
In terms of the hybrid cloud businessOpens a new window , we have already begun embracing Kubernetes in the IBM cloud and Red Hat’s OpenShift technology, which is based on Kubernetes, really adds even more value to that.
I think the [Red Hat] acquisition really helps IBM consolidate its strategy around Kubernetes, and now OpenShift. And with the OpenShift platform Opens a new window being available on multiple clouds, not just IBM cloud, it gives IBM a broader reach with some of its other offerings that we are incorporating into our cloud paks.
Learn more: IBM Doubles Down on Hybrid Cloud: OpenShift Now Available on IBM Z & LinuxONEOpens a new window
“Open technology is the cloud strategy†has been your mantra. How will open tech shape the future of IBM’s cloud strategy? What are some of the major milestones IBM plans to achieve going forward in 2020?
IBM’s cloud strategy is open technology; it’s open source and open standards. You can see that in our embracing of things like OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, docker and various Linux distributions, along with a lot of the services that we deliver through the IBM cloud, many of those are open source technologies that IBM is delivering through our composed solutions.
Essentially, we are seeing all of the innovation that IBM is doing, centering around open source. Whether it’s in our data and AI strategy, building out around TensorFlow or various other initiatives around AI and machine learning, to the various cloud and container capabilities, all of these technologies are based on a solid foundation of open source and open standards. That trend is going to continue and even accelerate.
Learn more: IBM’s New Enhancements for IBM Z® to Develop a Secure Hybrid Cloud StrategyOpens a new window
As large enterprises lean more towards open source, can you share tips on building and running open source communities? In your view, how has the C-suite’s approach to open source projects evolved over the last decade?
We are starting to see enterprises, that five or more years ago were considered consumers of technologies, starting to actually contribute to these open source communitiesOpens a new window as well as consuming the technology that those communities develop.
Companies’ contribution to open source communities is accelerating because in order to attract really good developers, they need to offer the ability for developers to work in these communities. So we are starting to see, not just vendors go into open source but, banks, insurance companies and other industries contributing to these important open source communities.
In terms of the mindset shift that’s necessary for executives in large companies, the first hurdle to get over is wondering if by allowing your engineers to contribute to open source, you are somehow contaminating the work they do internally. The answer is: no, because they are probably consuming open source anyway so whether they contribute that upstream or consume it, you are still facing the same issue.
It’s almost impossible to completely avoid open source today. It’s really about changing the mindset of having somebody else develop the dependencies for you, or getting involved and helping to keep those dependencies solid, fixing bugs, improving capabilities, performance or security for instance, is really an investment in your code base. Because it’s not just contributing something upstream, it’s really your code and you should treat it as that. It’s a matter of changing the mindset from, “I’m just getting some free software from Github,†to: “this is my codebase and I’m going to treat it as such, and treat it no differently than I would treat the software I am developing internally.â€
In terms of how the C-Suite approach to open source has evolved, I think they are starting to take it a lot more seriously. I have been dealing with a lot of folks in the C-Suite of various companies for a while now and a few years ago, a lot of engineers were wanting to use open source but executives were too nervous to allow it. Whereas today, executives actually want a lot of their engineers to be contributing to open source.
You’re starting to see a shift in the mindset that a lot of executives are starting to appreciate the value that open source has and you’re starting to see an increasing number of developers want to contribute to open source.
In fact, companies are starting to adopt open source programs as a means to attract engineering talent, and that has had an impact on the internal development culture. They are starting to bring the mindset of continuous integration and delivery into their enterprise.
Learn more: Amazon, Apple & Google Take an Open-Source Approach to Build a Smart Home StandardOpens a new window
Can you also share how you went from evangelizing open source to hyperledger technology?
Aside from evangelizing, I was actively engaged in various communities, helping teams on how to use open source technologies. One of the research teams studying blockchain technology that was exploring using open source came to me with something they developed internally, and asked if they should open source it and how they should bring this to market. So, I worked with the Linux FoundationOpens a new window to help establish the Hyperledger organization to use that as a place to contribute code that had developed internally and began growing a community and an ecosystem around that capability.
Learn more: IBM Announces Latest Version of Blockchain Platform SoftwareOpens a new window
Moving on to serverless computing frameworks, can you share what are the fundamental differences in the way large and growing organizations should approach these frameworks?
Increasingly, people are looking towards architectures such as microservices and now functions of serverless capabilities as a more effective means of delivering capability. It becomes much more flexible and easier to conceptualize that, “my function needs to do just this and I’ve got an environment that takes a message in, does some function and releases an output.â€
I think increasingly these types of architectures will evolve over time, the performance will get better, the costs will come down and the technology will extend beyond some of the interpretive languages to compiled languages as well, I suspect. I think in the end, these types of architectures start to become more about how people rethink their application portfolio and how they are going to deliver it in a cloud native way.
Learn more: Microsoft’s GitHub Acquisition Proves Open Source is Earning SourceOpens a new window
What are the top 3 challenges IT organizations can expect to emerge through the next decade as containers and serverless computing frameworks continue to evolve?
The greatest challenge that I think enterprises are going to have is embracing change in an ever changing landscape. Technology is constantly evolving, there are new inventions coming to the market, whether it’s serverless, containers, quantum, machine learning, etc. With all of these new technologies and capabilities, they have to be able to quickly adapt to the fact that there is new capability and, because they are in a competitive landscape, they need to embrace it quickly. It’s moving from a time where we would have a quarterly release of new software to run the business, and that was it. Now we are in an environment that is basically constantly changing.
New capabilities, new versions, or vulnerabilities are discovered and need to be patched quickly, it is a constant changing landscape. So now, IT needs to be much more responsive and therefore needs to embrace change – change is inevitable. You have to adopt strategies for how you deliver software in a way that it can be easily and quickly maintained, patched or improved. I think that is the primary challenge for enterprises, moving from a mindset of building one thing and moving on to keeping everything running and constantly improving it.
Learn more: Google Cloud Introduces Cloud Run, A New Serverless Computing StackOpens a new window
We know IBM maintains leadership in quantum computing but the technology is still a decade away from being mainstreamed? How will tech firms make a business case for quantum computing?
Real quantum computing hardware exists, and is available for public and commercial use, today.
IBM was the first company to make quantum computersOpens a new window available via the cloud. Since 2016, more than 200,000 users have experimented with our publicly available systems, which has led to more than 200 published research papers.
We also work with more than 100 organizations as part of the IBM Q Network. These Fortune 500 companies, academic institutions, startups, and research labs have access to our premium systems for use cases, which has included research in chemistry, finance, and machine learning, among many others. From an individual developer, to a business, it’s possible to explore quantum computing — using the Qiskit open source platform to program on real hardware — and learn how this technology could solve certain problems that will always be intractable for classical computers.
Learn more: Under Pressure, IBM Fires Back at Google on Quantum SupremacyOpens a new window
What’s in store for open technology in 2020, and what is going to be the new normal in 5 years in the way business is executed?
I don’t necessarily suspect that in 2020 we are going to start seeing crazy new things but, you never know. I do expect that as we continue to evolve serverless, machine learning and so forth, what’s more likely to happen is that some people will recognize that their work is better done out in the open, and that it would be more beneficial if everyone embraced the same set of capabilities and shared the developer expense together. I can’t predict which technology is going to emerge but I can predict, with some confidence, that we are going to start seeing much more proprietary development, with companies open sourcing that capability in the hopes that they can share it more broadly and create ecosystems around it.
About Christopher FerrisOpens a new window :
Christopher Ferris is an IBM Fellow and IBM’s Chief Technology Officer of Open Technology. Christopher has been involved in the architecture, design, and engineering of distributed systems for most of his 37+ year career in IT and has been actively engaged in open standards and open source development since 1999. He has technical responsibility for all of IBM’s strategic open source and standards initiatives, including OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Hyperledger Project, Open Container Initiative, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Mesos, Node.js and Docker. He represents IBM on the Hyperledger Governance Board.
About IBM:
IBM is the global leader in business transformation, serving clients in more than 170 countries around the world. Today, 47 of the Fortune 50 companies rely on the IBM Cloud to run their business and IBM Watson enterprise AI is hard at work in more than 20,000 engagements. IBM is also one of the world’s most vital corporate research organizations, with 27 consecutive years of patent leadership. Above all, guided by principles for trust and transparency and support for a more inclusive society, IBM is committed to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.
About Tech TalkOpens a new window :
Tech Talk is a Toolbox Interview Series with notable CTOs and senior executives from around the world. Join us to share your insights and research on where technology and data are heading in the future. This interview series focuses on integrated solutions, research and best practices in the day-to-day work of the tech world.
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