RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat is focused in big part on a commitment of the two to join forces for hybrid cloud services and solutions in what IBM Chair and CEO Ginni Rometty sees as a trillion dollar market. But they will face plenty of competition, including a new offering from Cisco.

Cisco, which operates one of its largest campuses in Research Triangle Park, on Thursday announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services – the No. 1 cloud provider – to offer hybrid cloud services.

Hybrid solutions enable customers to develop and run applications on their own data centers and in the public cloud as provided by Amazon and others.

Cisco also recently has made deals with Google and Microsoft.

Big Blue opens its arms, wallet, to Red Hat, but did deal cost too much at $34B?

The solutions are based on open source Kubernetes, developed at Google, which is a so-called container – a way for developers to “move” code between machines.

“Today, most customers are forced to choose between developing applications on-premises or in the cloud. This can create a complex mix of environments, technologies, teams and vendors. But they shouldn’t have to make a choice,” said Kip Compton, senior vice president of Cloud Platform and Solutions at Cisco. “Now, developers can use existing investments to build new cloud-scale applications that fuel business innovation.This makes it easier to deploy and manage hybrid applications, no matter where they run. This allows customers to get the best out of both cloud and their on-premises environments with a single solution.”

Added Terry Wise, Global Vice President of Channels & Alliances, Amazon Web Services: “More customers run containers on AWS and Kubernetes on AWS than anywhere else. Our customers want solutions that are designed for the cloud and Cisco’s integration with Amazon EKS will make it easier for them to rapidly deploy and run containerized applications across both Cisco-based on-premises environments and the AWS cloud.”