IBM
Hybrid cloud and AI software from Red Hat Linux and OpenShift to automation, data and security— IBM’s Red Hat, IT-operations, database, identity and data-security products, and how each one is licensed. This hub covers fifteen IBM products.
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The company, at a glance
Quick answer
Fifteen intel pages. Linux, Kubernetes, automation, observability, data, identity and security.
IBM’s line, product by product — every linked card is a full intel page, from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, OpenShift and Ansible to Instana, Db2, MaaS360, Verify, Guardium, QRadar and Storage Defender.
IBM MaaS360
Phones, tablets and laptops in one SaaS console.
Five list tiers from $1.50 for MDM and MAM to $9.54 a device a month; Premier adds a gateway and Enterprise adds mobile threat defence.
IBM Verify
SSO, MFA and adaptive access for every identity.
Priced on monthly active users per use case, with no public rate; SaaS, plus RADIUS and application gateways that reach older systems.
IBM Verify Identity Governance
Provisioning, reviews and activity-based SoD.
Separation of duties modelled on business activities, not roles alone; Exostar mapped 10,000 entitlements to a few hundred roles.
IBM Guardium Data Protection
Agents that watch activity on your databases.
Real-time monitoring with PCI, SOX, GDPR and CPRA templates; an Indian bank runs its agents on 75+ production databases for RBI rules.
IBM Guardium Data Security Center
Data posture, detection and crypto in one place.
Modules for DSPM, data detection and response, vulnerability assessment and Cryptography Manager, which was Guardium Quantum Safe.
IBM QRadar SIEM
On-premises SIEM metered by EPS/FPM or server.
Version 7.6.0 went GA on 30 June 2026; only the SaaS edition went to Palo Alto Networks in 2024. IBM cites 700 prebuilt integrations.
IBM QRadar SOAR
Case management and incident response playbooks.
Sold on-premises as its own SKU on continuous delivery, each version with 12 months or more of standard support; the SaaS edition left.
IBM Instana Observability
Auto-discovered full-stack tracing every second.
$21.20 per MVS a month on SaaS, $0.03 per MVS-hour pay-per-use or $385.20 a year self-hosted; an IBM blog puts the SaaS in Mumbai.
IBM Turbonomic
Right-sizes cloud, Kubernetes and data centres.
SLO-driven actions, workload parking included, for clouds, Kubernetes, apps and databases; SaaS or self-hosted, with no list price.
IBM Cloudability
Allocates, forecasts and trims cloud and AI spend.
Formerly Apptio Cloudability and now sold from apptio.com as IBM Cloudability; customers named there include BMO, UBS and Hyland.
IBM Db2
On-prem AI Editions or managed SaaS on IBM Cloud.
Db2 12.1 AI Community Edition is free to 4 cores and 16 GB; Db2 SaaS starts at $630 a month billed hourly, and a 200 MB plan is free.
IBM Storage Defender
Backup, immutable copies and ransomware alerts.
Bundles Storage Protect, Storage Sentinel and the Cohesity-based Defender Data Protect; IBM says FlashSystem flags ransomware in 60 s.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat’s subscription Linux for servers.
The Red Hat store lists a year of Server at US$383.90 self-support, $878.90 Standard or $1,428.90 Premium; SBI is a named user.
Red Hat OpenShift
Containers and VMs on one Kubernetes platform.
Four self-managed editions, Kubernetes Engine to Platform Plus, plus ROSA and Azure Red Hat OpenShift; Indian Bank runs Platform Plus.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Configuration and day-2 change, without agents.
Version 2.6 adds the Lightspeed assistant on OpenShift; self-managed or managed, with business-hours or 24x7 support, priced by sizing.
IBM Verify Privileged Identity
Platform & engineVault, Privilege Manager, Server Suite and DevOps Vault under IBM’s name but powered by Delinea; compare the Delinea original instead
Guardium Encryption, Discover and Classify
Platform & engineThales technology managed through CipherTrust Manager and sold in the Guardium family; TechBag reviews the Thales originals instead
Key Lifecycle and Cryptography Manager
Platform & engineKey management and quantum-safe crypto inventory; Cryptography Manager, once Guardium Quantum Safe, is on the Data Security Center page
Guardium Exposure Manager
Platform & engineAnnounced on 30 July 2026 to manage risk in the data that AI systems use. Too new for TechBag to review on its own page yet
IBM Storage Protect
Platform & engineFormerly Spectrum Protect: physical, virtual and application backup, sold alone or in Storage Defender, where TechBag covers it
Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security
Platform & engineKubernetes security bundled into OpenShift Platform Plus, so it is covered on the OpenShift page
DataStax and IBM Kubecost
Platform & engineDataStax now sits in watsonx.data and Kubecost tracks Kubernetes cost; neither has a page, and cloud cost is on the Cloudability page
IBM sells across 3 of the products TechBag carries in DevOps. The DevOps guide shows how the category splits and which part is yours. →
Also sold in Identity & Access (2 products) · Security (2 products) · Backup & Cyber Resilience (1 product) · Data Security & Privacy (1 product) · Endpoint Management (1 product).
Why “runs on your own servers too” is the whole story
Much of the market now sells security and IT operations only as SaaS. IBM still ships most of this line as software you can run yourself — RHEL, OpenShift, Ansible, QRadar 7.6, Guardium, Db2 and Instana’s self-hosted edition —so data can stay on your own hardware in India. For banks and government estates that must keep it there, that is the reason to shortlist IBM.
IBM Cloud
Three-zone regions in Chennai and Mumbai, run with Airtel since 2025; IBM does not say which SaaS products are hosted there.
IBM Concert
An agentic IT-ops layer that uses Turbonomic to optimise; listed from $1,766 an instance a month or $1.17 a resource-unit hour.
watsonx
watsonx.ai, watsonx.data, watsonx.governance and Orchestrate; outside TechBag’s IT-security and IT-operations scope, so hub only.
Confluent
Bought by IBM in a deal completed on 17 March 2026; Confluent keeps its own brand and domain, and has no TechBag hub yet.
Start with the job — platform, operations, data or security — then check whether the product is IBM-built, Red Hat or an OEM.
Peer & market recognition
Every claim on this hub traces to one of these public signals.
Leader, Access Management MQ 2025
for IBM Verify, as IBM states in a banner on its own Verify page
Leader, Observability Platforms MQ 2026
for IBM Instana, which was also placed as a Leader in the 2025 edition
Leader, Container Management MQ 2025
for Red Hat OpenShift, the third year running, per Red Hat’s press release
Leader, AI Governance Platforms MQ 2026
the first edition of that Magic Quadrant, for watsonx.governance
Leader, MarketScape UEM 2025–2026
IBM MaaS360 in the worldwide unified endpoint management software assessment
Leader in four categories, 2025
Guardium Data Security Center in the Leadership Compass for Data Security Platforms
QRadar SaaS divested
to Palo Alto Networks, which announced its end of sale in April 2025; IBM still sells QRadar SIEM and SOAR on-premises
CVE-2026-13477 fixed in 7.6.0.2
an authenticated admin command-execution flaw in QRadar SIEM, CVSS 4.7, in an August 2026 bulletin
The company in six figures
See the platform, hear the pitch
What does IBM do? 💡
A November 2025 short that sums up what IBM sells today; a brand clip, not a product demo.
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna: Creating Smarter Business with AI and Quantum | Smart Talks with IBM
An October 2025 conversation in which IBM’s chief executive sets out the company’s bets on AI and quantum computing.
IBM and Red Hat: Our ecosystems of partners
A 2019 clip on how the IBM and Red Hat partner ecosystems fit together; it is older than any product covered on this hub.
Where IBM sits — the grids
Two company-level views you won’t find on any vendor site — tap any dot for the rationale. The category-level grid lives on the product page.
IBM Across Its Solution Areas
Each dot is a IBM solution area: competitive position vs category momentum.
Red Hat revenue grew 11% in IBM’s second quarter of 2026, and OpenShift was a Gartner Container Management Leader for 2025.
Own-Infrastructure Deployment × Portfolio Breadth
How much of each vendor’s line runs on your own servers vs how widely it spans platform, operations, data and security.
Fifteen products that mostly run on your own servers as well as in a cloud, from RHEL and OpenShift to QRadar, Guardium and Db2.
Positions are TechBag’s illustrative synthesis of public review-platform standings and vendor documentation — not a reproduction of any analyst graphic. Verify before relying on it.
New to this? Learn it properly.
Zero-jargon starting points, in reading order. Each links into the deep education on the product page.
Where should you start with IBM?
Answer three questions; we’ll point you at the right starting product. No email required — this isn’t that kind of quiz.
1. What problem is forcing the decision?
2. Where must it run?
3. Who will own it?
Fifteen products, four families
Red Hat for Linux, Kubernetes and automation; IBM for IT operations and data; Verify and Guardium for security.
Read →QRadar after the SaaS sale
Palo Alto bought QRadar SaaS in 2024; IBM still sells the on-premises SIEM, so check its roadmap before rolling out.
Read →Names that changed
IBM dropped “IBM Security” from names; Spectrum Protect became Storage Protect, Guardium Quantum Safe Cryptography Manager.
Read →HashiCorp, also IBM
Terraform, Vault, Consul, Nomad and Boundary have their own TechBag hub; Red Hat sees Ansible and Terraform as complementary.
Read →India regions vs products
IBM Cloud has Chennai and Mumbai regions, but that does not put Verify, Guardium or MaaS360 data in India.
Read →Where IBM security fits
The Security category sorts SIEM, endpoint, identity and data protection into routes where QRadar, Verify and Guardium compete.
Read →The acronym decoder
Every term on these pages, in one place- UEM
- Unified endpoint management: phones, tablets and laptops managed from one console.
- IGA
- Identity governance and administration: provisioning, reviews and access certification.
- SoD
- Separation of duties: rules stopping one person holding conflicting access rights.
- DAM
- Database activity monitoring: recording and alerting on who queries which data.
- DSPM
- Data security posture management: finding sensitive data and how exposed it is.
- SIEM
- Security information and event management: collecting logs to detect attacks.
- SOAR
- Security orchestration, automation and response: playbooks that act on alerts.
- EPS and FPM
- Events per second and flows per minute: the meters for QRadar’s usage licence.
- MVS
- Managed virtual server: IBM’s licence unit for Instana and QRadar, roughly a host.
- FinOps
- Cloud financial operations: allocating, forecasting and cutting cloud spending.
- OEM
- A product built on another vendor’s technology and sold under a different name.
- Agentless automation
- Ansible’s model: it connects to systems to apply changes, with no agent installed.
Buy it like you’ve done this before
The procurement playbook TechBag runs with IT buyers — steps, licensing cheat-sheet, and the pitfalls that cost quarters.
Match each job to one product
IBM sells overlapping tools under several brands. Name the job first, then check whether it is IBM-built, Red Hat, HashiCorp or an OEM inside an IBM name.
Find the right meter
MaaS360 counts devices, Verify active users, Instana and QRadar servers or events, and Red Hat sizes each subscription; size each before asking for a quote.
Check where data is hosted
IBM Cloud’s Chennai and Mumbai regions do not cover every SaaS product. Ask in writing where Verify, MaaS360 or Guardium data is stored and processed.
Read the QRadar roadmap
Only on-premises QRadar remains with IBM. Confirm the 7.6 support cycle, patch to 7.6.0.2 or later, and compare a cloud SIEM before renewing.
Count list prices in USD
MaaS360, Instana, Db2 SaaS and the Red Hat store publish USD list prices; budget renewals on those list figures, not on any discount.
Get it priced in rupees
IBM publishes no INR list. TechBag gathers the quotes for each product you need and returns one total in INR with GST.
The licensing cheat-sheet
| Product | Licensing model | How you enter | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| MaaS360 | Per device per month · Fast Start, Essentials, Deluxe, Premier or Enterprise | $1.50 (Fast Start) | Mobile and laptop fleets |
| Verify | Monthly active users per use case · SSO, MFA and adaptive access priced separately | Quote | Workforce access |
| Verify Identity Governance | Usage-based · on-premises or cloud | Quote | Audits and SoD |
| Guardium Data Protection | Quoted · agents on each database, hybrid deployment | Quote | Database monitoring |
| Guardium Data Security Center | Quoted · modules for DSPM, DDR, vulnerability assessment and crypto | Quote | Data posture |
| QRadar SIEM | EPS and FPM, or per managed virtual server with unlimited ingest · subscription or perpetual | Quote | On-premises SIEM |
| QRadar SOAR | Separate on-premises SKU · continuous-delivery versions | Quote | Incident playbooks |
| Instana | Per MVS · pay-per-use, SaaS monthly or self-hosted yearly | $21.20 per MVS/month | Application tracing |
| Turbonomic | SaaS or self-hosted · Parking Edition available | Quote, 30-day trial | Resource right-sizing |
| Cloudability | SaaS · priced by package | Quote, free trial | Cloud cost control |
| Db2 | On-premises AI Editions, or SaaS billed hourly by vCPU and storage | Free; SaaS $630/month | Relational workloads |
| Storage Defender | Quoted bundle · Storage Protect, Sentinel and Defender Data Protect | Quote | IBM storage estates |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux | Yearly subscription · Self-support, Standard or Premium | US$383.90/year | Supported Linux |
| Red Hat OpenShift | Self-managed editions quoted · managed services on AWS, Azure and IBM Cloud | Quote; cloud from $0.076/h | Kubernetes and VMs |
| Ansible Automation Platform | Subscription priced by sizing · Standard or Premium support | Quote | Agentless automation |
MaaS360 (per device a month), Instana (per managed virtual server), Db2 SaaS and the Red Hat store publish USD list prices; Verify, Guardium, QRadar, Turbonomic, Cloudability, Storage Defender, OpenShift self-managed and Ansible are quoted. IBM shows the same USD prices on its India pages, with no INR list. TechBag gets the quote itemised in INR with GST.
Five pitfalls that cost buyers quarters
Treating QRadar as discontinued
Only the SaaS was sold to Palo Alto. IBM still ships on-premises QRadar, so an existing estate has a supported path, though not a cloud one.
Buying an OEM twice
Verify Privileged Identity runs on Delinea and Guardium Data Encryption on Thales CipherTrust. Check you are not already licensed for the original.
Comparing Verify without a quote
Verify publishes no per-user rate, only an estimator. Get its monthly-active-user quote before ranking it against identity rivals.
Assuming India hosting
IBM Cloud’s Indian regions are not a residency promise for every product; only Instana SaaS is documented in Mumbai.
Mixing up EDB and IBM
EDB is an IBM reseller partner, not an IBM company; IBM’s 2025 database purchase was DataStax. Ask who supports which product.
The evaluation kit
Each intel page carries an 8-question vendor checklist and a value calculator:
Skip the homework entirely
Bring your requirements and current tool bills — a TechBag advisor models the whole decision for you.
Book a discovery call →The forces shaping this market
Four trends with momentum scores (TechBag’s read of analyst and market signals) — and what each means for your next decision.
Category momentum — estimated market growth
Illustrative CAGR synthesis**TechBag’s illustrative estimate, not a quoted analyst figure. The takeaway: buyers are moving security and operations tooling to the cloud, while data posture and Kubernetes platforms grow — which is why IBM leads with Red Hat and data, and keeps QRadar on-premises.
Hybrid cloud on Red Hat
Red Hat revenue rose 11% in IBM’s second quarter of 2026, while IBM’s total revenue grew 1% and guidance was cut.
What it means for you
Expect IBM proposals to lead with OpenShift and RHEL.
Real-time data for AI
IBM completed the Confluent purchase in March 2026 after DataStax in 2025, and Data revenue rose 19% in Q2 2026.
What it means for you
Ask how Db2 fits next to the newer data products.
Quantum-safe cryptography
Guardium Quantum Safe is now Cryptography Manager in Data Security Center; IBM plans over $10B of quantum spend in five years.
What it means for you
Inventory your cryptography before the vendors ask.
SIEM moving to the cloud
IBM sold the QRadar SaaS business to Palo Alto in 2024, keeping on-premises QRadar 7.6, which went GA in June 2026.
What it means for you
Plan the next SIEM cycle before support ends.
Questions buyers ask about IBM
Ready to shortlist IBM?
Open any of the fifteen intel pages for the deep dive, or let a TechBag advisor build the case with you — the devices, users or servers to license, the IBM, Red Hat or HashiCorp product that fits, quotes, trials, GST invoicing and lifecycle support included.
Stats, positions and figures are illustrative syntheses of public materials; verify before purchase.