Recent news publications and industry events have revealed important details about IBM's cloud platform. IBM's Blue Cloud Initiative has enlisted new clients and will partner with Juniper to develop new technology for its 13 global cloud centers.
According to the official press release, IBM will offer consulting services for enterprises willing to use the cloud, as well as data protection in SaaS flavor, and a new cloud environment for software testing purposes. The company claims that their testing platform can save clients up to 20 percent on improved provisioning time while also reducing labor costs. IBM's test cloud environment also aims to minimize the human error factor, using automation and standardization.
The other big news is that IBM will be partnering with Juniper Networks, Inc., in order to allow selected customers to "extend their private clouds to remote servers in a secure public cloud." The two companies will make entire clouds scalable, advancing one of the basic advantages of cloud technologies an entire stack level upwards. In contrast, existing cloud offerings offer seamless scalability on the application and server levels.
"IBM today has a cross-company portfolio of cloud computing offerings for business, such as server capacity on demand, online data protection, and Lotus e-mail and collaboration software. Analyst firm IDC predicts that cloud computing services will represent a $42 billion market by 2012."
According to GigaOm, IBM chose Juniper over Cisco because of Cisco's alleged intrusion into Big Blue territory, in the form of a rumored line of Cisco servers and data center virtualization solutions. So, business as usual.
While not targeted at mom-and-pop enterprises, IBM's continued involvement with cloud computing and storage is likely to raise public awareness for this relatively new technology, and persuade more big companies to move significant parts of their in-house IT operations to specialized data centers.
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