Charting a new future for two tech giants
A new solution for modern app development
IBM and Red Hat merged to capitalize on their core strengths in cloud computing and managed services. One of the key challenges the company faced was aligning on a vision for how each company’s core platform would consolidate as an evolved, comprehensive offering. The team turned to argodesign to help understand and define this strategy.
An open marketplace for service providers
Though offering similar tech services, the two companies varied in crucial ideological ways regarding sales strategy. While IBM leaned into top of stack solutions based on Cloud Paks and business user applications like Watson, Red Hat instead focused on the middleware layer with its custom managed version of Kubernetes, OpenShift. Another key difference is that Red Hat is a company founded on open source software, and a key value of the firm is a platform-agnostic approach (meaning, can be run on AWS, Azure, GCP, and IBM Cloud) that treats 3rd-party and 1st-party applications as equal, in opposition to Big Blue’s winner-takes-all position.
Aligning the needs of IT and business
The key questions we were trying to answer were how to design an open-platform for competitors, one that could be run on any infrastructure, that would naturally emphasize the combined strengths of these two firms to amplify the appeal of IBM’s business solutions? To answer this, we explored a variety of technical approaches and exercised designs across specific use cases.
Cross-platform apps and services at your fingertips
The resulting experience detailed a hybrid-cloud-first approach, built on OpenShift, featuring an open marketplace for apps, data, and services, and modern interactions for navigating across environments and applications.
An open, integrated approach for admins, developers, and business managers
Dubbed Hybridge, the redesigned platform imagines new ways for developers, administrators, and business users to collaborate and work together more seamlessly using their preferred servers, tools, and methods.
