IBM’s cloud strategy: Will it become the best in the business?

March 12, 2014 Off By David
Object Storage

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

IBM wants your cloudy dollars – and it’s making an extremely aggressive play to be the market leader in enterprise cloud computing. In some minds, however, it already is. Exhibit A: chief executive Virginia Rometty, in an open letter to investors published as part of the company’s 2013 annual report, spelled it out: “IBM today is the leader in enterprise cloud.”

The reason? Investment. Big Blue has shelled out $7bn on 15 acquisitions, with Rometty singling out the purchase of IaaS provider SoftLayer above all else. The latest move was earlier in March, when the company announced it was to push $1bn of resources and investments into cloud, rolling out SoftLayer in new geographies and providing a developer-friendly PaaS offering called BlueMix…

In other words, the 102-year-old International Business Machines now sees itself as a cloud company first and foremost. For Doug Clark (left), cloud leader at IBM UK & Ireland, it’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time. “The portfolio that we’ve got now is absolutely industry-beating across almost every dimension,” he tells CloudTech. “I don’t mean that in an arrogant way, but every conversation I have with clients and customers, the products that we’ve got in our toolkit…seem to have real resonance in terms of what clients are trying to do…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2014/mar/12/ibms-cloud-strategy-will-it-become-best-business/

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