IBM Offers Partners IaaS, PaaS to Meet Growing Cloud Demand

To help its channel partners meet growing demand for the cloud, IBM has launched SmartCloud Enterprise+ infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and SmartCloud Application Services platform-as-a-service (PaaS) as public cloud solutions. The goal, according to IBM, is to help partners expand their portfolios with public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructures and cloud applications for its customers.

Here’s a high level overview of the two new solutions, as per IBM’s press release:

• SmartCloud Enterprise+ is an IaaS platform designed to provide “enterprise-class governance, administration and management control, multiple security and isolation options built into the virtual infrastructure and network and real business-centric SLAs.” Right now, it’s mainly intended for partner use as a hosting platform, but “qualified IBM Business Partners” will be able to resell the platform starting in 2012.
• SmartCloud Application Services is a PaaS solution enabling ISVs to offer applications from IBM’s cloud — the first ever to focus exclusively on enterprise needs, according to Big Blue. Technical details are fairly scarce, but IBM promises it will enable developers to leverage Java and other open standards and come with no vendor lock-in. A beta will be launching in the fourth quarter of 2011.

Another interesting tidbit: IBM is now offering white-label capabilities for business partners who are already invested in the IBM SmartCloud ecosystem.

This announcement also came with word of IBM SmartCloud Foundation, a private cloud platform for use on virtualized IBM hardware (IBM SmartCloud Entry), provisioning (IBM SmartCloud Provisioning) and monitoring (IBM SmartCloud Monitoring). SmartCloud Foundation is now available to business partners through the IBM PartnerWorld portal, according to the press release.

I have to say, I’m intrigued. It’s not that these solutions alone are unique: Microsoft Windows Azure already offers PaaS; OpenStack has the open standard IaaS platform market’s attention; and even Oracle has launched its own version of these solutions. But of the old guard in IT, IBM’s the one that’s building the most partner buzz around its cloud infrastructure solutions.