IBM Unveils SmartCloud Services, Technologies For Enterprises

IBM has announced next generation cloud services and technology advances for clients moving key enterprise business processes into production cloud environments to innovate, reduce costs and increase agility.

To accelerate the shift from experimentation, development and assessment to full scale enterprise deployment of cloud, IBM is building out its existing cloud portfolio with IBM SmartCloud, its next-generation, enterprise cloud technologies and services offerings for private, public and hybrid clouds based on IBM hardware, software, services and best practices.

As part of this announcement, IBM is demonstrating a next-generation, enterprise cloud service delivery platform currently piloting with key clients and available later this year. Enterprise clients will be able to select key characteristics of a public, private and hybrid cloud to match workload requirements from simple Web infrastructure to complex business processes.

Announcements include new services, software, standards initiatives, and customers wins, which include IBM SmartCloud, which will be offered in two tiers, Enterprise and Enterprise +, giving clients choice and economic benefits, combining the cost saving and scalability of a shared environment plus the flexibility to “dial-in” the security, existing applications, reliability, management and support services more typical of a private environment.

The IBM Workload Deployer is a single platform to enable clients to provision all the middleware and application components they need to run Web workloads in the cloud across multiple systems in a simple and repeatable fashion. This will allow businesses to respond quickly to new requests for services from their customers, and rapidly deploy new applications that will increase revenue and deliver greater customer satisfaction.

IBM is joining with more than 45 global enterprises like Citigroup, Lockheed Martin and NC State University to help advance cloud adoption prioritising key interoperability issues such as management, reference architectures, hybrid cloud, as well as security and compliance, thus forming the Cloud Standards Customer Council.

“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 Mills, senior vice president, Senior Vice President and Group Executive - Software & 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 and open source – and we’re doing it now for cloud.”