Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

IBM Introduces Commercial Cloud Services and Solutions: Page 2 of 2

By comparison, IBM's initial Smart Business offerings aim to leverage cloud developments to alleviate specific, thorny problems the company's enterprise clientele find immediately or increasingly painful. For example, the Smart Business solution for development and testing highlights the critical role that internal software development plays in delivering ongoing business value and competitive advantage by tackling the complexities and costs businesses face in providing and managing development/test infrastructures.

The Smart Business solution for virtual business desktops stretches cloud computing in a slightly different direction - positioning these highly flexible technologies as a foundation for supplanting pricey, hard-to-manage traditional PCs and laptops. In both cases (and, we assume, in future Smart Business solutions), IBM will leverage various developments in virtualization, grid and clustering, as well as the increasingly robust server, storage and networking technologies underlying cloud infrastructures.

Smart Business provides the company an effective platform for punctuating the "right tool/ right place" value proposition of its broader Purpose Built hardware strategy. We also find it notable that IBM's new workload-optimized Smart Business systems continue to fill out the CloudBurst product line the company launched in April (with a WebSphere-specific cloud computing appliance). Most importantly, the Smart Business initiative reflects a continuing, underlying strategy that defines IBM business solutions in emerging areas, including grid and high performance computing (HPC).

In those earlier situations, the company worked with customers and partners to identify and define commercially viable markets for what until recently had been niche technologies. By taking a carefully targeted approach to solution development, IBM has been able to nurture opportunities in economically sustainable ways that provide continuing value to its customers. Overall, we consider the company following a similar strategy with Smart Business and CloudBurst solutions to be good news for IBM customers and a lesson worth considering for businesses and vendors contemplating the future of cloud computing.