Big Blue gets a big cloud idea

The latest announcement from IBM is interesting, not least because it does seem to indicate that one of the biggest – and certainly longest established – of the old school traditional IT vendor is showing real signs of understanding what the cloud is all about. In addition, it does seem to show strong signs of understanding just what has changed in the relationship between vendor and purchaser with the development of cloud services.

In essence the key is to know that the vendors now need to sell what the customers actually need, rather than getting them to accept a reasonable approximation as the best that can be provided. When it comes to cloud services, therefore, that means having the widest possible range of service options available, ideally coupled with advice, consultancy, and packaged services that reduce issues to, as far as possible, being a no brainer. This is particularly important for the SMB marketplace, which is generally accepted as the driving force behind future business, commercial and wider economic development.

Even a company with the clout of IBM can no longer hope to cover all the bases of every possible application that every potential customer might feel is appropriate to them – and there was a time when IBM would have prided itself on just such a capability. So partnerships is the order of the day, and the company’s cloud business has made a serious point of building on just such a capability.

It has a large number of managed service providers and solutions software vendors already on its books, so is increasingly in the position of being able to offer – or more correctly be the ground on which service providers and service consumers meet so as to move towards – business solutions that make sense and add value to the end user business. That is why the current announcement from IBM is particularly pertinent.

The company has launched a new Cloud marketplace that brings together IBM’s wide and diverse portfolio of cloud capabilities and new third-party services in a way that delivers a simple and easy experience for three key user groups within the enterprise – developers, IT managers and business leaders.

The object is to help them learn, try, and consume software and services from IBM and its global partner ecosystem. This single online destination will serve as the digital front door to cloud innovation bringing together IBM’s capabilities-as-a-service and those of partners and third party vendors with the security and resiliency enterprises expect.

The marketplace offers instant access to IBM’s intellectual capital, array of services and software capabilities, and access to IBM’s extensive and specialised enterprise client network. For the partners themselves, IBM's cloud marketplace provides a global path to the enterprise and new opportunities to collaborate with a network of channel partners in its ecosystem to generate new revenue streams driving cloud innovation.

The idea is that the marketplace will serve as a cloud innovation hub where technology meets business with hundreds of cloud services - from IBM itself , the partners and the third party ecosystem.  Clients can access a full suite of IBM-as-a-Service with 100 SaaS applications, IBM's Bluemix platform-as-a-service with composable services, the powerful SoftLayer infrastructure-as-a-service and third party cloud services.
 
It is also an important step sideways towards viewing cloud issues from a user-related perspective. This is particularly important as a counterpoint to IBM’s extensive investments in trying to build the most comprehensive cloud portfolio for the enterprise.  

This year alone IBM announced a $1.2 Billion investment to expand its global cloud footprint with SoftLayer, $1 Billion in cloud development with the launch of Bluemix, Platform-as-a-Service enabling much of IBM middleware to the cloud, $1 Billion in the launch of a new business unit, the Watson Group for cloud-delivered cognitive innovation, and the acquisition of Aspera, Cloudant and Silverpop. This brings the total invested in 17 cloud acquisitions since 2010to $7 Billion.

"Increasingly cloud users from business, IT and development across the enterprise are looking for easy access to a wide range of services to address new business models and shifting market conditions," said Robert LeBlanc, Senior Vice President, IBM Software & Cloud Solutions. "IBM Cloud marketplace puts big data analytics, mobile, social, commerce, integration - the full power of IBM-as-a-Service and our ecosystem - at our clients' fingertips to help them quickly deliver innovative services to their constituents.

The Cloud Marketplace works by providing clients with route through to discovering, testing and experiencing hundreds of IBM and partner enterprise-grade cloud services online that are open, scalable and secure. Content is dynamically served up by job role, and service pages offer easy, intuitive access for those interested in categories such as Start-ups, Mobile, Gaming and others.

The three user types will be targeted with specific online offerings. For business professionals Cloud marketplace for business is aimed to be a single stop where business and IT professionals can learn about, deploy and consume over 100 SaaS applications ranging from Marketing, Procurement, Sales & Commerce, Supply Chain, Customer Service, Finance, Legal, and City Managers.  

For developers it aims to provide an integrated, get-started-now, cloud-based development environment where individual developers, development shops and enterprise development teams can build enterprise applications via leading services and APIs.  These can be easily and securely integrated in hybrid on premise and off premise cloud environments.

For IT departments Cloud Marketplace for Ops provides a secure set of cloud services built on Softlayer that help clients deploy cloud services. SoftLayer gives clients the ability to choose a cloud environment and location that best suits their business needs and provides visibility and transparency to where data reside, control of data security and placement with a choice of public, private or bare-metal server options.    Services include Big Data, Disaster Recovery, Hybrid environments, Managed Security Services, Cloud Environments for Small and Medium Business among others.