IBM launches first full set of cloud services

Big Blue says it's giving clients a reliable way to "standardise IT functions that are rapidly becoming too costly or difficult to use". And that's the mantra around IBM's Smart Business cloud portfolio – helping clients "turn complex business processes into simple services". How? By bringing "sophisticated automation technology and self-service to specific digital tasks". Such as? Well: "software development and testing; desktop and device management; and collaboration". IBM makes the point that the world's physical infrastructure – and that absolutely includes manufacturing and its supply chains – is rapidly becoming more instrumented and IT-enabled, so data centres are increasingly having to deal with floods of transactions and data. "Cloud is an important new consumption and delivery model for IT and business services. Large enterprises want our help to capitalise on what this model offers in a way that is safe, reliable and efficient for business," comments Erich Clementi, general manager, Enterprise Initiatives, IBM. "Smart Business demonstrates that we take this responsibility seriously, with cloud investment and solutions targeting the early opportunity. We are responding as we did assisting enterprises with the shift to e-business and in the embrace of open source and Linux," he adds. In brief, IBM is providing three approaches to deploying its cloud model: IBM Smart Business standardised services on the IBM Cloud; Smart Business private cloud services behind the firewall built by IBM (run by IBM or the customer); and IBM CloudBurst workload optimised systems, for clients who want to build to their own cloud with pre-integrated hardware and software. All three offerings include IBM's service management system – a kind of air traffic control system for IT that automates self-service, provisioning and monitoring, while also managing access and security for the cloud.