Vendors are coming up with new and creative ways to avoid being sucked into the price war raging among Amazon, Google and Microsoft in the infrastructure-as-a-service market. IBM, for its part, is simply steering clear of the pay-as-you-go model and sticking with the subscription-based pricing scheme of SoftLayer, the hosting provider it picked up last June  and which now constitutes the literal foundation of its cloud strategy.

Big Blue last week cut the price of SoftLayer object storage to $0.04 per gigabyte a month, slashed rates on online servers and introduced a low-cost networking service that provides a secure way for enterprises to connect their on- and off-premise environments. The company also revealed plans to provide support for Docker and the complementary Docker Hub, a newly launched service for sharing workflows and code related to the open-source Linux containerization engine.

While IBM is working to faciliate a broader range of use cases,  Salesforce.com is focusing on enabling more devices. The managed CRM powerhouse is rolling out a new program called Wear designed to help companies fill in the missing link between wearable gadgets and business processes. Upon signing up, users receive a Developer Pack for Salesforce 1 that includes reference code, documentation and other resources aimed at simplifying the creation of applications for smart wristbands, augmented reality eyeglasses and all the other new device categories making their way into the modern workplace.

Wearable technology has a bright future in the enterprise, but for the time being, the overwhelming majority of IT organizations are focusing their public cloud efforts on addressing other priorities like ensuring service-level agreements and meeting data compliance requirements.  Canopy promises to make things a little easier for CIOs with Cloud Fabric, a new enterprise offering based on Pivotal CF, a platform-as-a-service offering from the EMC federation.

The product augments Pivotal CF with value-added features such as the ability to host latency-sensitive applications on-premise or in a nearby data center and a choice of tenancy options ranging from shared infrastructure to dedicated instances. Canopy is also offering professional services to help customers tailor their deployments to address company-specific requirements.

Photo credit: Pensiero via photopin cc