Oversize #20: With Cloud Satellite, IBM takes its hybrid strategy to the next level

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Editor's note: When Arvind Krishna took over as CEO of IBM in April 2020, he announced a maniacal focus on hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence in his day-one memo to the staff—something I wrote about in the first edition of Oversize last year. The company’s acquisition of Red Hat in the previous year had set the stage for this strategic transformation. The cloud market can be divided between public cloud and private cloud. Public cloud, offered by the likes of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, implies renting out computing resources, storage, and services from cloud centres, while private cloud is where a company builds its own cloud servers and infrastructure, on its own premises. Hybrid cloud is when you use a combination of the two—spreading your systems over your own infrastructure and that of a third-party public cloud platform. IBM is a relatively small player in the public cloud market. IBM Cloud, born out of a 2013 acquisition of Softlayer Technologies, has a market share of only 5%. That is pretty much why IBM went all-in on hybrid cloud with an …