After months of rumors on “Blue Cloud offerings”, they unveiled their strategy and showed that using IBM Tivoli products can help you setting up a complete privat, public or mixed offering. Based on the characteristices of Cloud computing:
-          Elastic Scaling
-          Rapid provisioning
-          Resource Abstraction
-          Flexible pricing

IBM has almost everything in place to set up a cloud offering: Ranging from Virtualization and Provisioning, over open Standards for SOA and Information management up to a complete IT Service Management solution (based on IBM Tivoli), that monitors and controls the processes around the offering. Sounds quite easy, doesn’t it.

IBM is pushing pressure on the competition on the cloud front. To emphasize this, they also start a new offering based on AWS EC2 to provide parts of their Software portfolio (DB2 and Informix Databases, as well as Webshere Portal and Middleware) to customers on a On-demand pricing model <LINK>. This offering might be used for setting up rapid test and developments environments. Dana Gardner has more on this topic <LINK>.

This step is kind of suprising, because some people might have though, that Big Blue was going to have a competing offer for public clouds. I think that this step proves, that IBM won’t battle Google and Amazon, instead they are focussing on Enterprises. This is what their customers demand.

In combination with these releases, IBM also presented a bunch of customers for their offerings <LINK>, to prove that their offering are real.

So it seems, that cloud computing could be quite easy, if you have a good set of products and some good, strategic partners. Let’s wait and see.