News

IBM Fleshes Out Public, Private Cloud Portfolio

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• 10/18/2011

IBM has revealed more about its SmartCloud public and private cloud portfolio, indicating it intends to target an expected growing base of enterprise customers.

One-third of the 500 enterprise IT and business executives answering an IBM survey say they have deployed more than one cloud pilot to date (that figure is expected to double by 2014).  The survey also found that 40 percent say they see the cloud as bringing “substantial change” to their IT environment. IBM expects to support as many as 200 million users in the cloud by the end of 2012.

“It’s clear to us, what we’re seeing is a fundamental transformation of how our clients are trying to change the economics of their IT environment and speed the delivery of new innovative products and services,” said Scott Hebner, vice president of market strategy at IBM Tivoli.

When it comes to public clouds, IBM plans to launch a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) called SmartCloud Application Services.  The solution will consist of a managed services offering that provides application infrastructure. The service will offer application lifecycle management, application integration, and application management for hosted environment.

The new PaaS offering, due to go into beta later this quarter, will run atop IBM’s Smart Cloud Enterprise and Enterprise+, the company’s public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings announced in April. IBM recently announced the commercial availability of the IaaS offerings in the United States with full global availability slated for the end of 2012.

Building on its private cloud portfolio, IBM launched its SmartCloud Foundation for customers that want to build and operate cloud infrastructures internally. The company introduced three offerings:

• SmartCloud Entry: a starter kit that allows organizations to build private clouds running on standard x86 or IBM’s Power processor-based infrastructure. The modular offering lets organizations scale as demand for capacity increases.

• SmartCloud Provisioning: Software consisting of a provisioning engine and an image management platform that can spin more than 4,000 virtual machines in less than an hour, IBM said.

• SmartCloud Monitoring: A tool that provides views of virtual and physical environments including storage, networks and servers. It offers predictive and historical analytics designed to warn IT admins of potential outages.

IBM also said SAP Managed Application Services, announced in April, is now available. The service provides automated provisioning and management of SAP environments.