IBM Spends Heavily On Cloud Services, Moving Its Software Portfolio To The Cloud

Adjusting to the latest technology trends, International Business Machines (IBM) has started to move a huge chunk of its software portfolio and almost all of its existing platform services to the cloud, putting its recently acquired SoftLayer Technologies to use.

IBM purchased SoftLayer, a public cloud company last year for a mammoth $2 billion, making its intentions very clear about future data storage policy. On top of that, IBM fixated $1.2 billion in January to allow room for 15 new data centers. After the purchase of Lotus Development, a software company, in 1995 this is the biggest price IBM has paid.

The CEO of Softlayer, Lance Crosby has expressed that in order to make the services accessible for worldwide users in a more convenient fashion, the company is going to bring majority of the IBM middleware to the cloud.

To let developers and organizations search for and organize their IBM applications and other services, the technology giant also plans to introduce a marketplace.

It needs to be remembered that IBM has faced seven consecutive quarters of falling sales, because a great portion of internet population started using Cloud over buying their own servers. The organization is banking on its cloud services to somehow revive its business, by allowing developers to create and adjust applications in the cloud, which is an extremely effective method of storing information these days, preferring online technology instead of local servers.

More and more companies are showing their inclination towards cloud technology these days. A New York based organization, Armonk, has revealed that it will spend $1 billion on cloud-software development till 2015, which is almost twice of what it spent in the last couple of years.

Danny Sabbah, the chief technology officer of IBM, admitted that it was vital for IBM to expand the range of its potential audience, allowing them to make use of SoftLayer. Apart from enhancing the services for existing customers, Sabbah hopes that IBM’s initiative will encourage new clients towards the company.

Several experts believe that IBM has taken a massive gamble through SoftLayer as it is facing tough competition in the cloud market from competitors like Amazon.

Over the years, IBM has attracted a specific market, mostly bank and insurance clients for its cloud services, but Sabbah is optimistic that the latest steps taken by the company will attract new customers.

One of the major changes introduced by IBM has been BlueMix, an open source enterprise software portfolio, which assists developers in creating applications on its cloud infrastructure. This service is on the same patterns as Red Hat Inc.’ OpenShift,  Amazon’s AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Heroku Inc.’ development platform.

IBM has revealed to have agreed to purchase Cloudant Inc., a cloud-delivered database company, and its services will be offered in the BlueMix application. However, the financial terms of the deal have not been made public as yet.

To ensure that apps can be downloaded on hybrid cloud, which can access data in both onsite and offsite, SoftLayer will also get middleware offerings, including WebSphere.