IBM unveils SmartCloud to push private, public clouds

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: IBM announced cloud services and technology advances for clients moving enterprise business processes into cloud environments.

IBM began its cloud initiative nearly five years ago establishing "Blue Cloud" labs around the world to accelerate collaboration with innovative clients, governments and universities.

Also Read: IBM opens 38mn APAC cloud data centre

Cloud is now a core growth area for IBM expected to drive $7 billion in revenue by 2015 in hardware, software and services.

Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive - Software & Systems, said: "We have a track record of helping clients safely embrace and accelerate enterprise adoption of new models and technologies — from e-business to Linux and open source — and we're doing it now for Cloud."

IBM is building out its existing cloud portfolio with IBM SmartCloud, its next-generation, enterprise cloud technologies and services offerings for private, public and hybrid clouds based on IBM hardware, software, services and best practices.

IBM SmartCloud, which is built on IBM's existing public cloud, will be offered in two tiers, Enterprise and Enterprise +.

Enterprise version will be available from now on and will be expanding on its existing development and test cloud.

Enterprise + will be made available later this year. This will complement and expand on the value of enterprise, offering brand new capabilities provide a core set of multi-tenant services to manage virtual server, storage, network and security infrastructure components including managed operational production services.

IBM announced a new Workload Deployer, with which IBM will provide a single platform to enable clients to provision middleware and application components to run web workloads in cloud.

IBM also announced that it has joined Cloud Standards Customer Council, which has over 45 enterprises such as Citigroup, Lockheed Martin and NC State University, who are striving to advance cloud adoption by prioritizing key interoperability issues such as management, reference architectures, hybrid cloud, as well as security and compliance.

IBM is demonstrating a next-generation, enterprise cloud service delivery platform currently piloting with key clients and available later this year.