Kyndryl Unveils Cloud-Native Services For AWS, GCP, Azure

‘When we split from IBM, we were working on the IBM Cloud and on customer on-prem data centers but not doing anything with the three major hyperscalers. Now we have partnerships with AWS, GCP and Azure and can give customers as seamless an experience as possible on any of them,’ says Harish Grama, Kyndryl’s cloud global practice leader.

Global infrastructure services provider Kyndryl Thursday introduced new cloud-native services as a way to help customers modernize their applications for use on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.

The need for cloud-native services comes as businesses increasingly adopt cloud-native platforms for their applications, said Harish Grama, cloud global practice leader for New York-based Kyndryl.

Cloud-native platforms will be at the foundation of over 95 percent of new digital initiatives by 2025, up from under 40 percent in 2021, Grama told CRN, citing data from research firm Gartner.

[Related: Kyndryl CEO Martin Schroeter: We Are Exiting The Influence Of IBM]

“Businesses have been on a cloud-native journey for a while,” he said. “They are paying attention not just to the lift-and-shift to the cloud, but also cloud-native services including PaaS, databases, artificial intelligence, machine learning and so on.”

That move for the most part has been due to the development of hybrid applications or modernized applications because there’s not enough time or money to make some applications cloud-native, Grama said.

“They want applications that look like they work on the cloud,” he said. “But making sure they can monitor, manage and patch those applications, or move them from development to production, is not easy. So a lot of Fortune 2000 customers are depending on their managed service providers to get their applications moved to the cloud and optimized for it.”

A lot of MSPs and global systems integrators have static tools that run on-premises or in the cloud for AWS, Google and Azure, but they require new software licenses and often new hardware on which to run, Grama said.

Kyndryl is introducing Kyndryl Cloud Native Services, which is aimed at helping customers migrate, modernize and optimize their critical workloads in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, Grama said.

“If you are on Google Cloud Platform, use our GCP services,” he said. “If you are on AWS, use our AWS services. If you are on Azure, use our Azure services. Combined with our practitioners and experts, you can start running on the cloud. And we can make it a seamless experience.”

Kyndryl Cloud Native Services represents a big move for Kyndryl, which last year was spun out of IBM where the company was previously known as IBM’s managed infrastructure services business, Grama said.

“When we split from IBM, we were working on the IBM Cloud and on customer on-prem data centers but not doing anything with the three major hyperscalers,” he said. “Now we have partnerships with AWS, GCP and Azure and can give customers as seamless an experience as possible on any of them. We also have centralized IP [intellectual property] to give an overall view of the cost, compliance and so on, all using the native cloud capabilities.”

While some MSPs and global systems integrators can move applications to the cloud, they often use their own “secret sauce” and may leverage the public cloud’s own services for the “last mile,” Grama said.

Kyndryl did it that way as well when it was spun out of IBM but now is using cloud-native tools to provide an end-to-end cloud-native experience, he said.

“We’ve had discussions with our hyperscaler partners on this,” he said. “They tell us they’re not seeing anyone else doing this end to end.”

Kyndryl currently is offering Kyndryl Cloud Native Services for AWS, Azure and GCP, Grama said.

“But these three account for 80-plus percent of the market,” he said. “As customers ask for more, we will do it.”

Looking ahead to 2023, Grama said Kyndryl expects distributed clouds to become common, with a control plane that also manages on-premises applications similar to Google Anthos or AWS Outposts.

He also said Kyndryl is focusing on being industry-specific.

“There are no real tools to build clouds for industry verticals,” he said. “But customers need an industry lens because all customers are in one industry or another.”