CLOUD WARS — IBM’s blockbuster acquisition of Red Hat for $33.4 billion to create a hybrid-cloud powerhouse signals a massive shift in the cloud-computing industry away from vendor-driven technology-first approaches and toward a customer-centric model that offers C-level execs strategic and high-value digital-business capabilities.

Just as Henry Ford is rumored to have said more than 100 years ago that car-buyers can have any color they want as long as it’s black, too many cloud providers in today’s world have boxed corporate customers into closed and proprietary cloud systems that also are unable to offer simple connections into traditional on-premises technology.

That’s because most first-generation cloud services were quite intentionally set up in isolation from not only those on-premises systems but also from other cloud services, partly in a land-grab effort and partly because the nature of first-gen solutions are by nature narrow, specific and fragmented.