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IBM introduces new Platform-as-a-Service Solution

Posted by Michael Stal on Oct 14, 2011

Sections: Operations & Infrastructure,; Architecture & Design,; Development
Topics: Java SE ,; Java EE ,; Java ,; Languages ,; IBM ,; PaaS ,; Cloud Computing ,; Enterprise ,; Programming ,; Companies

On 12th October IBM has unveiled in New York what the IT company claims to be

the industry’s most advanced cloud services and software designed from the ground up for enterprise clients.

It is the goal to support 200 million users by the end of 2012 due to the migration of client applications and processes to the new cloud service platform. In particular, this might be an additional option for software development organizations interested in building their own cloud or leveraging the SmartCloud infrastructure hosted by IBM.

An advantage of a Platform-as-a-Service for developers and architects is the ability to directly develop applications for the cloud. Thus, they can focus on the application, instead of dealing with complex infrastructure issues. Competitors in this area include Microsoft’s Windows Azure and the Google App Engine. It is a matter of trust to deploy secure information or services on a Cloud operated by another company. Thus, buying IT infrastructures from IBM to create clouds might be a viable alternative. In addition, IBM is considered by many corporations as an IT vendor with a long experience in mission-critical development of medium- to large-scale solutions.

According to IBM,

the Application Services will run on IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise and Enterprise+ - specifically designed to run enterprise workloads, at committed business centric service level agreements.

In detail, the whole IBM Cloud portfolio comprises the following constituents:

SmartCloud Application Services which represents a new platform-as-a-service solution.
SmartCloud Foundation consisting of hardware and software that allows customers to deploy their own cloud system.
SmartCloud Ecosystem consulting service for helping clients to adopt cloud models and manage cloud-based transactions.

The company also announced a new partnership with the Cloud-storage company Nirvanix. According to the press release

Under the terms of the OEM agreement between IBM and Nirvanix, IBM will include cloud storage technology from Nirvanix designed to enable customers to upload a file of any size from anywhere in the world and access it anywhere—as opposed to forcing customers to upload the same file multiple times in multiple geographic regions and imposing strict file size limitations.

The new services will be available as beta in this quarter, providing Java support and cross-platform support. The IBM public Cloud infrastructure as well as a migration services will be first available in the US in 2012.

More information for interested readers is available on IBM’s web site.