IBM goes after Microsoft Azure

Well, finally IBM decided to join the Cloud bandwagon where Microsoft, Google, Amazon already sits comfortably. Lately IBM has been pushing its cloud technologies and services against Azure. IBM Cloud right now is aimed at developers. But the ultimate plan is to have a public cloud with an array of application services such as WebSphere and DB2.

Like Microsoft’s recently-released Microsoft Azure services, the new IBM Cloud, released last week, is targeted at developers and testers. However like Microsoft, Amazon and Google, IBM is clearly looking to extend its portfolio of products and services to the public cloud over time.

“You will see IBM continuing to release this set of work-based cloud computing environments,” said Daniel Kloud, director of cloud computing in IBM’s Rational business group.

“IBM has been talking a good cloud game for the last year or so,” notes Forrester Research analyst James Staten in a blog posting. “But its public cloud efforts, outside of application hosting have been a bit of wait and see. Well, the company is clearly getting its act together in the public cloud space with last week’s announcement.”

While IBM does offer targeted hosted services such as Lotus Live, the company’s new IBM Cloud service brings some key components of Big Blue’s platform to the commercial cloud such as its WebSphere suite of application servers and its DB2 and Informix databases.

IBM’s new commercial cloud service currently only supports hosting of Linux systems – the company did not disclose plans for offering Windows Server images other than to say it will be expanding on its stack.

The public IBM Cloud infrastructure is based on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) stack based on the Kernel-Based Virtual Machine (KVM). Red Hat acquired the technology from Qumranet in 2008.

As part of its launch, IBM released Rational Software Delivery Services for Cloud Computing v1.0, which includes components of the company’s Rational development and testing suite. IBM is not publishing pricing for its service.

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