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October 14, 2008
IBM's Cloud Strategy: A Little Bit of Everything
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IBM launched a mini-campaign last week to promote its cloud computing strategy, and part of that strategy involves not using cloud computing at all.
In his official statement on the matter, Willy Chiu, vice president of the High Performance on Demand Solutions division, said IBM is moving clients and itself to “a mixture of data and applications that live in the datacenter and in the cloud.” A mix of on-premise and in-cloud operations, as another IBM exec put it. So, those concerned the world is going silly with cloudmania need not worry.
And if the critics are correct and it really is silly to stake a claim in cloud computing, IBM doesn’t seem to care. The company has made cloud announcements almost monthly during the past year, and last week outlined four ways it plans to “capture the cloud computing opportunity”: (1) offering its own set of cloud products and technologies; (2) helping other companies develop cloud services; (3) helping customers integrate cloud services into their businesses; and (4) building cloud environments for other companies.
“We see an enormous opportunity to help companies use cloud services and to integrate SaaS into their business,” said Dave Mitchell, director of strategy for IBM Developer Relations, during a discussion following IBM’s official announcement. Now that the “emotional” concerns about software as a service have settled, and security practices have proven effective, “the real challenges are bubbling to the top,” Mitchell said. The biggest one is integration. “You’re going to run some stuff on-premise, and some over the cloud. So how do you integrate and administer it all in the most effective way? That’s what we’re solving.”
IBM’s strategy for solving the integration issue: money and effort. Last November, it announced the Blue Cloud initiative, a program aimed at helping companies run large-scale applications and handle massive amounts of data across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources -- or to move enterprise applications to a cloud. IBM supplies the know-how based on its own cloud construction experience, the hardware (typically racks of iDataPlex servers) and middleware (mainly Tivoli for service management).
The company says it has dedicated 200 “Internet-scale” scientists to cloud research and is sponsoring programs at universities to train the cloud scientists of tomorrow. In recent months, it has opened cloud computing research centers around the world where customers can develop and test cloud technologies with Big Blue’s assistance; the newest are in Brazil, Vietnam, India, and South Korea, for a total of 13. The company says it is spending nearly $400 million to expand cloud computing capabilities at its research parks in North Carolina and Tokyo.
All this research has paid off, Mitchell said, with technologies that enable instant provisioning of resources across many servers, dynamic workload management, utility-based usage and accounting, and improved security. “These technologies underlie everything we’re doing to make the cloud viable and affordable. Clients have the ability to allocate servers and other resources on demand. Advances at the component level include the promise of storage devices with extreme data access speeds.” A related program is the New Enterprise Data Center, focused on making IT more efficient. A major catalyst for the program is “the fact that the cost of running a datacenter has gotten extraordinarily expensive,” Mitchell said.
Anyone interested in a public example of an IBM cloud application can check out the beta site for Bluehouse, which demonstrates a place where people from different organizations can work together by sharing all kinds of files, holding online meetings, and so on. (IBM marketing says it combines social networking and online collaboration tools.)
IBM also has set up 40 “innovation centers,” where independent developers can “do porting, technical enablement, and have all the equipment they need to perform scalability testing and benchmarking,” Mitchell said. “We invested heavily in our technical blueprint for building a SaaS solution on IBM middleware, a multitenant solution. ISVs can take this information and bring it to one of our innovation centers to develop their own projects.”
IBM has been “quite aggressive in establishing datacenters and cloud computing centers internationally to lay the groundwork for a shift in how people view large-scale computing,” said Vishwanath Venugopalan, analyst with The 451 Group. “Not many cloud infrastructure providers have been as open with their own infrastructural plans.”
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