IBM lowers SoftLayer cloud prices but sticks to the plan
IBM is walking a fine line in the public cloud. While trying to remain special and distinct from its rivals, it also wants to stay competitive. At least, that’s what it’s trying to balance according to a statement made yesterday where Big Blue announced several price cuts for its cloud services. It actually slashed its prices back in February too, although it chose not to announce it at the time.
In its statement, IBM said it was slashing SoftLayer object prices to $0.04 per gigabyte a month, trimming its compute prices, and rolling out a low-cost networking service that gives companies a secure, high-bandwidth connection to the cloud. The reduction brings IBM’s prices in line with those of public cloud big shots like AWS, Google and Microsoft.
IBM has tried to keep its distance from the commodity cloud wars, much like Rackspace is doing, knowing it would be on a slippery slope if it went up against some of the most aggressive price cutters. Instead, IBM’s SoftLayer charges companies to rent out entire “bare metal” servers on a monthly basis, thereby skipping out on the hypervisor software that establishes virtual machines to run each app. This option differentiates SoftLayer from rivals AWS and co., guaranteeing higher performance at the cost of more ornate manageability requirements.
As well as the price cuts, IBM has made quite a few announcements related to its cloud computing business this week. One was a way to connect on-premises servers with the SoftLayer cloud, while another discussed its efforts to integrate Docker into existing IBM products, and another spoke of the arrival of new data centers for government customers.
Big Blue has also tried to make its cloud offering more appealing with the addition of NoSQL database capabilities via its acquisition of Cloudant, and by building middleware to make it compatible with apps running OpenStack.
What with all these announcements, it’s clear that Big Blue is sticking to its strategy of trying to stand apart from other cloud providers rather than fight them on cost alone. Don’t expect IBM SoftLayer to be cutting its prices again any time soon.
photo credit: ecstaticist via photopin cc
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