IBM's Business Cloud Gets Real

IBM is stepping up its offerings of cloud-based software for big business, which it says will enable companies to make faster decisions at lower cost.

While little of this is new, the incremental change matters more for profits. The announcement shows IBM is confident enough in its capabilities as a provider of computing from remote locations to take them mainstream.

"We've been primarily doing this work with developers," said Steve Mills, Senior Vice President and Group Executive – Software & Systems. "This is around not just building, however deploying." The company has already announced that cloud-related business should bring IBM $7 billion in revenue by 2015.

I asked Mills if this announcement was another way of saying the tech is now housebroken. "Maybe not a bad term," he said. "IBM has always put a premium on security, auditability, and reliability. There have been things like Amazon EC2 [the bookseller's wildly successful cloud lease offering, more popular with startups and divisions than the core computing of big companies]  – this provides IBM quality of service.

"That isn't to take away from Amazon, it's just largely for small business. Nevertheless you have to choose your design points, and this is a design for medium- and large-sized business." Your move, Mr. Bezos.

In addition, IBM said it is piloting a then and there-generation service platform, displaying public, private and hybrid enterprise computing models. It is in testing with a few clients now, the company said, and will be broadly available later in the year.

IBM didn't specify which companies would be working to straighten out its then and there-gen model, however elsewhere is is was working with Lockheed Martin and State Street, among others, on interoperability issues, and companies including Costco, Frito Lay and American Airlines on the social business aspects.

The SF-based National Editor at Forbes

As the SF-based National Editor at Forbes, I write a lot about tech, nevertheless am interested in a lots of different people and markets. I've done covers on Google, HP, Wireless, Africa, Philanthropy, Yahoo, and the Canadian dope industry. I was at The Wall Street Journal, covering tech in the Silicon Valley, and earlier that wrote about Japanese banks, financial markets, and the energy business from Tokyo. I have been a traveling salesman, a street peddler, a ghost writer, and a bellboy at a hotel in Alaska. I've got degrees from Kenyon and the University of London, and held a Knight-Bagehot fellowship at Columbia. I lecture at U.C. Berkeley's iSchool, appear Saturdays on Fox News' "Forbes on Fox," and manage to keep my wife and two teenage sons reasonably entertained.