UPDATED 22:38 EDT / NOVEMBER 02 2017

CLOUD

Bye-bye Bluemix: Big Blue dumps the brand in favor of ‘IBM Cloud’

IBM Corp. is killing off the “Bluemix” brand name for its platform-as-a-service offerings for creating cloud computing applications and instead will lump all of its cloud products under “IBM Cloud” badge.

The move follows IBM’s decision last year to dump its old “SoftLayer” brand name, which was previously used to identify its infrastructure-as-a-service products such as computing and storage. Back then, IBM switched all of its SoftLayer services to Bluemix in order to unify the operator and developer experience in its cloud.

Earlier this week, IBM did another brand switch, stating that “Bluemix is now IBM Cloud.” The company justified the move in a statement, saying it’s “merging the Bluemix brand with IBM Cloud brand since they’ve grown to be synonymous.”

That much is true, and so now all of IBM’s cloud products and services, including its Watson Data Platform and its IaaS, PaaS and software-as-a-service offerings, now fall under the new branding.

The company has also created a new logo (pictured) to mark the occasion: a cloud with a rising sun behind it, presumably symbolizing a new dawn for its cloud services.

IBM Cloud could certainly benefit from a rebirth. Big Blue has often been cited as one of the “big four” cloud giants, alongside rivals Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. But analyst firm Gartner Inc.’s most recent Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, which ranks cloud providers, failed to reflect those claims.

The research firm ranked IBM in a distant fifth place, behind Alibaba Group Ltd.’s Alibaba Cloud, only just ahead of Oracle Corp.’s own rather nascent cloud offering. Gartner noted at the time that IBM was unable to match its rivals in some pretty basic IaaS features and said its “cloud experience is somewhat disjointed,” comments that may have had an impact on the firm’s decision to reorganize its offerings under a single brand.

Not much else has changed besides the branding, as IBM promised it will continue to offer all of the products and services that fell under the old Bluemix brand.

Image: IBM

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