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Plan of Attack
As Dan Farber noted, IBM's aim is to be an arms supplier to cloud vendors and service providers. "IBM also has created a 'Blue Cloud' initiative to provide data center infrastructure for Web sites," explains Farber, adding that, "The rack-based iDataplex server is part of the initiative."
Asked by Farber whether IBM had plans to provide consumer cloud services like Google's, Mills replied:
"For the consumer, no. We have made it clear in the market that our orientation is not toward [the consumer]. It is not that we won't help others serve the consumer, we are happy to do that, but we don't want to be consumer facing. That is not our forte."
Change of Plan
IBM apparently has modified its strategy, as it has just announced a new cloud service called Smart Analytics Cloud. As Reuters reported on November 16, 2009: "IBM launched a new cloud computing service on Monday, aiming to take on companies such as Amazon.com Inc, Google Inc, Microsoft Corp and Salesforce.com Inc." IBM said the The Smart Analytics Cloud will enable customers to analyze information from their own data combined with data from IBM's archives. IBM said the service would first be adopted internally under the name BlueInsight.
While Reuters and other news agencies are characterizing IBM's new cloud service as similar to the services of Google, Amazon.com and Microsoft, a closer look shows that there is a difference, and that IBM's cloud service falls into line with its enterprise and mainframe strategy.
As Mike Vizard explains on ctoedge.com:
"Leveraging its acquisition of Cognos, the IBM Smart Analytics Cloud allows customers to roll out an implementation of Cognos 8 running on top of virtual machine software running on top of a Linux operating system hosted on an IBM mainframe. The entire backend system is managed by IBM, but customers can customize their instance of Cognos 8 because each implementation runs as virtual instance on the mainframe."
You Can't Touch This
With IBM aiming to serve corporate customers' cloud needs through internal cloud platforms, Mills casts cloud services like Google's as unable to meet the more stringent requirements of enterprise customers. Said Mills to Information Age's Kenny MacIver:
"Our corporate buyers are running mission critical apps, and they are not going to pick up their businesses and take them to some amorphous and ill-defined data centers. The cloud as some amorphous concept that meets all needs and requirements is science fiction."
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