12 days of ITAM: Day 12 - IBM in 2023

IBM

12 days of ITAM: Day 12 - IBM in 2023

The year ahead with IBM includes many areas to watch, says Miriam Redding, Director at Navigate Clear.

IBM’s cloud strategy is a hybrid cloud approach with a focus on industry specific solutions. IBM CloudPak’s are the new bundling of existing software solutions to offer more flexibility in deployments. This presents both opportunity and challenge to clients in 2023 as they shift to cloud and containers.

It’s worth mapping out any IBM assets in your portfolio to understand how they translate to a CloudPak world. Keep an eye on inclusions such as Watson within software solutions to determine how the ongoing use works in a CloudPak offering. Ask IBM for roadmaps where possible.

We’ve seen in Asia Pacific that IBM requires you buy CloudPak to use existing software in a containerised environment. Interestingly PVU is an eligible metric which would indicate that there is an intent to allow some existing software to be used in containers without the need to purchase.

It’s worth a review of the updated licensing FAQs for containers. Any use of IBM software in containers requires the use of the IBM License Service (ILS), similar to ILMT for virtual environments. If you run both virtual and container environments, you will need both ILMT and ILS.

In other news, Red Hat and IBM continue to approach the market as separate organisations however it was announced late last year that Red Hat Storage roadmaps and some employees will be integrated into IBM for a unified storage experience across containers. There may be further news through the year of other areas integrating into IBM.

Other regional differences include the recent price increases announced for 2023. Ranging between 19-24%  for eligible perpetual and subscription licenses and 7-15%  for SaaS. Check the announcement to see the implications for your region.

Since the Red Hat acquisition, the world of IBM has seen a fast rate of change. 2023 looks to be just as exciting.

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