IBM: IT Pushing Demand for Company Cloud Services

IBM's SmartCloud public and private cloud portfolio are being fleshed out in answer to a growing demand from IT and enterprise users.

Based on an IBM survey of 500 enterprise IT and business executives, 33 percent have deployed more than one cloud pilot to date, a figure poised to double by 2014. The survey also found that 40 percent see the cloud as bringing "substantial change" to their IT environments. IBM said it will be supporting 200 million users in the cloud by the end of next year.

"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, VP of market strategy at IBM Tivoli.

On the public cloud front, IBM plans to launch a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) called SmartCloud Application Services, which will consist of a managed services offering that will provide application infrastructure. The service will offer application lifecycle management, application integration and the ability to manage applications in the 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 this week 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 looking 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 announced the availability of its SAP Managed Application Services. Announced back in April, the service will allow for the automated provisioning and management of SAP environments.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on October 14, 2011