IBM has pushed in its platform-as-a-service strategy today, which has been accompanied by a series of SmartCloud software and services being launched. The latter has been specifically designed to court enterprise customers. IBM, even known as Big Blue, notified that it has ported SAP, enterprise resource planning applications and all databases to its private cloud platform.
IBM even noted that the company’s enterprise cloud effort was open to software vendors, resellers and other partners. IBM’s cloud platform has a couple of early customers and the list includes Kaiser, ING, Citi and Lockheed Martin.
As IBM is planning its cloud expansion, it would meet its competitors such as HP and Oracle, on its way, who even have been working on expanding their cloud footprint. The latter competitor has already outlined its cloud strategy last week and the former is expected to work on its plan and accordingly come up with their cloud detailing which was outlined earlier this year. To add in, Dell has already worked its way to enter the software-as-a-service portfolio through plans and acquisition to offer cloud services.
Apart from these enterprise vendors, competing amongst themselves to ensure a better positioning of their cloud efforts, they even face stiff competition from emerging players such as Amazon Web Services. The main competing point here would be related to security and management. The difference in these cases have been mainly on the basis of the efforts employed by the large enterprise players. IBM have their focus more on the maturity basis, while HP focuses on private betas, whereas Oracle has just announced.
Talking about IBM’s plans, it is working on to support 200 million users by the end of 2012 and it has accumulated its proceedings accordingly over the last three years by putting in cloud building blocks. In April, the company expanded its cloud portfolio and accordingly it has continued to tweak.
Noting the key points of IBM’s SmartCloud, one can brief it as follows:
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A PaaS effort that will be aimed at traditional IT environments.
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Application services designed for mission critical enterprise software. IBM’s SmartCloud Application Services will offer enterprise security, Java and cross-platform support without lock-in. These application services will be designed to manage lifecycles, allocate resources, deploy and manage cloud environments. For instance, IBM has added an SAP environment to enable faster database installation, maintenance of libraries and refresh systems.
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Software to better deploy and control cloud architecture inside corporate firewalls. IBM SmartCloud Foundation features prepackaged private cloud software, provisioning engines and monitoring software.
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Services for partners and software developers to move to the cloud, build on IBM’s infrastructure and manage transactions. SugarCRM will provide its applications on IBM’s cloud. IBM also partnered with Nirvanix to offer storage as a service to customers.
IBM didn’t shy off from agreeing that the cloud game is still in its early stages as 33 percent of enterprises have deployed pilots. However, the percentile of enterprises is assumed to rise to 40% except in case of cloud computing to bring substantial change.