IBM unveils new cloud strategy and services

IBM has unveiled a portfolio of services and initiatives aimed at encouraging enterprise customers to move more of their infrastructure into the cloud.

It hopes that the offering, dubbed IBM SmartCloud, will allow businesses to move from experimentation and assessment of cloud services, to full-scale enterprise deployment.

IBM expects to see $7bn (£4.2bn) in revenue by 2015 from its cloud offerings.

"We are committed to helping clients both extend their IT investments and become leading providers of cloud-based business process services in their own industries," said Steve Mill, senior vice president and group executive, software and systems.

"We have a track record of helping clients safely embrace and accelerate enterprise adoption of new models and technologies – from e-business to Linux to open source – and we're doing it now for cloud".

IBM SmartCloud will be offered in two tiers – Enterprise and Enterprise+.

The Enterprise service is available today and IBM said it allows customers to reduce application development from days to minutes through automation and rapid provisioning.

IBM claimed this will cut costs by at least 30 per cent compared with traditional application environments.

Enterprise+ will be made available later this year and will expand on the Enterprise offering. It will provide multi-tenant services to manage virtual servers, storage, network, and security infrastructure components.

IBM has also said it will release new software to help companies build cloud services across areas such as sales, marketing and human resources.

The IBM Workload Deployer will allow companies to assemble such customised cloud services with templates based on IBM best practices.

The Deployer will provide clients with a graphical user interface where they can install applications, configure databases, and set up security for the cloud services they require.

IBM has also announced that it and more than 45 "leading cloud organisations" have combined forces to form the Cloud Standards Customer Council in a bid to lower barriers to cloud adoption by working with other companies to assess such issues as security and compliance.

This news follows Dell's announcement of its move into the cloud. It aims to invest $1bn (£609m) in the current fiscal year in building new datacentres to provide clients with cloud offerings, and will also release new cloud products.