By Aaron Tan
Publication Date: 2025-11-25 00:41:00
For a long time, the adage in the IT world was that “nobody gets fired for buying IBM”. Today, the technology giant is trying to carve a new reputation as a neutral broker in a fragmented, multi-cloud world.
With rising geopolitical tensions and data sovereignty laws in the Asia-Pacific region, CIOs are increasingly wary of being tethered too tightly to a handful of major cloud hyperscalers. Hans Dekkers, IBM’s general manager for Asia-Pacific (APAC), believes this anxiety presents opportunities for the company’s open hybrid cloud and domain-specific AI strategy.
Unlike Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft or Google, IBM is not vying to be a general-purpose public cloud supplier. Instead, it is pitching itself as the connective tissue – using Red Hat’s open-source software to allow applications to move freely between on-premise servers and various public clouds.
Computer Weekly spoke with Dekkers about the challenges facing APAC boardrooms, why he compares Red Hat…
