IBM Cloud strategy early but shrewd, as per experts

SINGAPORE: From the lens of James Staten, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research,  it looks like IBM is starting to build some serious momentum in the Public Cloud Platform game, specially after a slow and somewhat disjointed start,

The company got a leg up with its 2013 acquisition of Softlayer, a managed hosting company with a small but legitimate hybrid cloud solution, he notes in his recent blog post.

"Behind a self-service interface and set of APIs, it blended per-month and per-hour offerings as well as virtual and bare metal resources in a way that let customers ease into cloud from traditional hosting. Then IBM partnered with Pivotal to bring CloudFoundry to its Softlayer platform and build anew a successor to its IBM Smartcloud Application Service smiddleware environment which had struggled. After a furious effort to get its software division to think and move at agile speeds, the company brought out BlueMix in Q1 and started populating a cloud marketplace of ISVs. And now, in the last two weeks it has taken BlueMix to general availability, added differentiated data analytics services in the form of Watson Cloud and announced a serious mobile play through its partnership with Apple." he noted.

While all of these latest efforts are in their infancy, they point to a much more robust cloud offering from a clear enterprise leader, Staten heralded. And these are moves that bear watching and consideration for all clients who have yet to move significant portions of their application portfolio into the cloud.

"Again, IBM is early in its implementation of this new cloud platform strategy but its moves of late are shrewd and compelling. If any doubt still lingers about IBM's true commitment to cloud, they should be shelved for now. While the promise of a $10B investment in cloud may have been more of a catchall statement aimed at Wall Street, these three moves put real meat behind the strategy."