IBM Unveils Cloud Services and Partnerships

Earlier this month IBM announced a multitude of next generation cloud services and technology advances for clients moving key enterprise business processes into production cloud environments to innovate, reduce costs and increase agility.

IBM SmartCloud

The IBM SmartCloud offers a mix of private, public and hybrid clouds based on IBM hardware, software, services and best practices. The Enterprise implementation of SmartCloud allows a business to expand on internal development and test efforts with a reduction of application tasks from days to minutes via automation and rapid provisioning.  The Enterprise+ implementation adds the ability to provide a core set of multi-tenant services to manage virtual server, storage, network and security infrastructure components.

Client adoption, new software and  Cloud Standards

IBM announced increased client adoption of its cloud computing software and services with more than 20 million end-user customers worldwide, making it one of the world's largest providers of software-as-a-service (SaaS).  Client additions include American Airlines, CARFAX, Frito-Lay, IndiaFirst Life Insurance Co., Shriram Transport Finance Company Ltd., and 7-Eleven.  To help accelerate adoption new software was introduced to help companies build their own cloud computing platforms to delivery business benefits in a wide range of industries such as banking, insurance, retail and communications.  IBM Workload Deployer provides a single platform to enable clients to provision all the middleware and application components they need to run Web workloads in the cloud across multiple systems in a simple and repeatable fashion. IBM also announced that they have joined more than 45 leading cloud organizations to form the new Cloud Standards Customer Council, which is managed by OMG.

IBM teams with Akamai

IBM and Akamai (AKAM) announced new offerings designed to speed the delivery of Web and cloud applications to the employees, partners and customers who rely on them. The offerings are part of a multi-phase initiative that integrates IBM WebSphere technology with Akamai's (NASDAQ: AKAM) application delivery network. IBM plans to introduce IBM WebSphere Application Accelerator for Hybrid Networks, which will create a hybrid network between private enterprise networks and the public Internet. Clients seeking to increase the speed and reliability of their interactions with public cloud and software as a service applications will benefit from this offering. "Enterprise users of cloud-based or software as a service applications are often subjected to unacceptable performance and availability," said Willie Tejada, vice president, Application and Site Acceleration, Akamai. "Together, IBM and Akamai have the technologies needed to address the challenges posed by these increasingly popular application delivery models. The availability of the public and hybrid network products will also help customers bring their WebSphere applications to market faster, more efficiently, and at less cost."

IBM JumpStarts Cloud Ecosystem

IBM announced that they are making available two pricing and financing programs to help IBM Business Partners and start-up companies more easily build their own cloud applications and infrastructures with IBM technology. To complement the way that Cloud Application Providers receive payments from their own clients IBM will provide the option of acquiring IBM software for use in their SaaS offerings as a monthly rental subscription.  Additionally they will offer low-rate financing programs available from IBM Global Financing, the lending and leasing arm of IBM.  “More and more clients are asking IBM and our partners to provide them with cloud capabilities around the globe, ranging from the flexible delivery of software applications to building private and public clouds,” said Jim Corgel, general manager, Independent Software Vendor (ISV) and Developer Relations, IBM. “IBM's business partner community is essential to our ability to support these demands, and we are committed to providing the industry's best resources and opportunities to help our partners grow their business through the cloud.”