IBM kicked off Pulse 2014 Monday morning with a list of announcements of new services for its worldwide cloud designed to meet the needs of three important constituencies: business leaders, developers, and IT. Its strategy for taking leadership in the growing public business cloud arena is to create a compelling overall environment, based on open standards, that makes standardizing on the IBM cloud compelling.

It is leveraging all its resources to accomplish this, following its announcement in January of a $1.2 billion investment this year in expanding its cloud network worldwide, including construction of 15 new data centers, bringing its total to 40. To accomplish this it announced the porting of important existing hardware and software assets to SoftLayer for delivery through its cloud, increased support for the open source community around Cloud Foundry, and a major new acquisition.

Wikibon Cofounder and CEO David Vellante said on TheCUBE (see embedded video below), “IBM’s got the game plan, they’ve got the portfolio, they’ve got the public cloud platform, they’re moving toward transparent pricing and service, they’ve got a middleware and path layer, they’re developing an ecosystem, as you pointed out they’ve got more work to do on the developer side, they’re building data centers at scale, they’ve got a vision for hybrid. It’s all about services, services, services and gettin on what Amazon calls ‘the flywheel’. That’s a formula to compete.”

IBM, said Erich Clementi, SVP of Global Technology Services, has identified three vital areas as the focus of its cloud development going forward:

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1. Data as the new natural resource. “Those companies that can succeed at exploiting data for business advantage will be the winners in the market.”
2. Cloud as the new delivery medium for business services.
3. Speed of development and flexibility to constantly adapt to changing market conditions.

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IBM’s strategy, as exemplified by the list of Pulse announcements, illustrates how it intends to build on that basic insight in its business plan. They also play into its market strategy. By supporting open platforms for IaaS, it attacks its real competition, Amazon, while gaining support from its former competitors, HP and EMC, which are no longer a threat. By building higher level services on top of that platform, it moves the focus of competition up the stack, where Amazon doesn’t play. And by porting its middleware to SoftLayer it enriches its cloud stack quickly with proven value capabilities while giving its existing customers, who use that software on-premise, a new reason to stay with IBM while moving to hybrid cloud environments.

The announcements

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IBM announced that it is a founding member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, announced Monday morning by Pivotal, along with EMC, HP and several other members. The Foundation’s mission is to guide the development of Cloud Foundry as an open system. Erich Clementi, SVP of Global Technology Services for IBM, said the foundation is designed to ensure that the technology is completely open, and he pointed out that “some names” were not on the list of founders because they had to commit to supporting an open platform. While he declined to name any cloud service providers, the reference to Amazon.com, which has dominated the cloud news over the last two years, is obvious.

Keeping the basic cloud platform open is important to corporate and government users, so that they do not repeat the experience of the early decades of the computing era, when users were locked into the proprietary systems of a single vendor, often IBM, that put them at the mercy of what that vendor brought to market and what it decided to charge. Open systems at base layers and open APIs between higher layer services will give customers more freedom to choose the services and software that best fits their needs going forward. IBM obviously hopes to drive this message home in the marketplace and in the process emerge publicly as a market leader and take some of the attention and mindshare away from Amazon.

Watson and middleware

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It announced that Watson, its next-generation cognitive computing platform is being moved to SoftLayer. In conjunction with that, IBM SVP of Systems & Technology & Integrated Supply Chain Tom Rosamilia announced that Power Systems will be “infused” into SoftLayer, which until now has run only on x86. This is important because Watson runs only on Power, and because of the OpenPower Consortium that IBM, Google, Mellanox, Nvidis, and Tyan created in August. Recently Panasonic, the Suzhou PowerCore Technology Company which specifically intends to manufacture Power chips, and the Research Institute of Jiangsu Industrial Technology have joined.

Adding Power as an underlying platform for SoftLayer allows IBM’s cloud and other private and managed cloud systems based on SoftLayer to use Power platforms. This is particularly important for the online gaming community, several of which run on the IBM Cloud and SoftLayer. The advantage is that SoftLayer allows them to run on “bare metal” unvirtualized hardware, getting maximum power to run the very demanding gaming environment, while still having the management, security and high speed network capabilities of the IBM cloud.

It also announced a $1B investment into capabilities-as-a-service to speed development of hybrid clouds including a new developer PaaS, BLUmix, which provides a set of services that can be plugged into cloud applications, for instance to integrate cloud services with back-end systems of record. Included in this are IBM Patterns, which provide frameworks for developing apps that incorporate standard APIs and other components that can increase the pace of development.

And it announced that it will acquire Cloudant, a NoSQL database-as-service company with high scalability and connectivity across systems, databases, and applications. This will also be added to the IBM SoftLayer platform and offer IBM customers, particularly those developing Big Data platforms, an easy path to adding a NoSQL database to their environments. While Hadoop is the data universal front-end data capture platform, by itself it is really a data file system, and companies often need a more fully capable NoSQL database behind Hadoop to support data analysis.

So does this make the IBM cloud compelling for CIOs? It certainly is a major step in that direction. The developer tools ate particularly important, because if IBM can attract developers off Amazon then the applications they develop will be more likely to end up on the IBM platform. And while the middleware port is mostly a defensive move, IBM needs to keep its existing large customer base as the IT environment moves to the cloud, and this is an excellent way to strengthen its story with those customers. Two things are clear — the cloud market is heating up and IBM is determined that it will have a major role as it grows.

Graphics courtesy IBM Corp.