IBM ups cloud offering

cloud computing tools designed to help business partners adopt cloud business models and generate new revenue streams by offering public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructures, applications and services to their clients, Channel Insider reports.

The company is extending the IBM SmartCloud portfolio with two new public cloud services, SmartCloud Enterprise+ and SmartCloud Application Services.

According to Loren States, an IBM VP and CTO for cloud computing, the IBM platform as a service (PaaS), which is part of the company's SmartCloud Services portfolio, is specifically designed to support traditional enterprise applications based on Java and DB2, including a dedicated implementation of SAP ERP application software, IT Business Edge says.

In the future, IBM will expand the types of applications and languages supported by its PaaS platform, said States, but, for the moment, IBM will focus its efforts on the types of applications that most of its customers currently run.

Platform computing is all about managing clusters, grids and their cloud-computing counterparts. Its tools are powerful, comprehensive and offer organisations the ability to utilise complex system configurations, ZDNet reports.

This is both a strength and a weakness. The products are very powerful, but often seem a bit overwhelming to the uninitiated. The appearance of complexity has caused some to consider technology that was much less capable, but appeared to be more tightly focused on the needs of a single market.