IBM Corp. has quietly retired its Cloud for Education offering, a service that was launched just a couple of years ago.

The service was intended to provide compute infrastructure and services for academic and research lab workloads. Cloud for Education, which made its debut back in 2021, was geared toward educational institutions.

The launch came at a time when it was assumed they would all embrace remote learning given the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The service offered educators access to computing lab resources from any location via a number of research-optimized virtual machines that were preconfigured with applications such as IBM’s SPSS statistics software.

Just two years later, IBM is killing off the offering. As of Nov. 30, 2023, IBM Cloud for Education will be deprecated and withdrawn from service and support. The June 30 announcement was made on the quiet, appearing on IBM’s cloud status page, with no mention of it elsewhere.

According to the company, the deprecation includes all IBM Cloud for Education Applications Lab plans. Customers are being advised to migrate their data and workloads to IBM’s Virtual Private Cloud or Code Engine services. Alternatively, they can migrate to third-party platforms offered by the likes of Dizzion Inc. and Citrix Inc.

IBM didn’t really give any official reason for the closure, saying simply that it regularly evaluates its cloud service offerings while keeping things like customer requirements and consumption in perspective. The service will continue to operate as normal until Nov. 30, and customers are being invited to talk with IBM’s representatives about the steps they can take to migrate their data and workloads to an alternative platform.

Analyst Charles King of Pund-IT Inc. said it’s quite a normal thing for tech vendors to pursue commercial opportunities that don’t live up to their promises, and that many failures due to fundamental market changes rather than technical shortcomings. “IBM’s decision to shutter its Cloud for Education fits firmly into that scenario,” he said. “The need for highly flexible, available and secure online resources for educators and students was radically different during the height of the Covid-19 epidemic in 2021 when IBM launched the service than it is today.”

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that Cloud for Education clearly wasn’t as successful as the company had hoped it would be, because it wouldn’t retire the offering otherwise. “But it’s good to see IBM is retiring the service in a respectful way, giving its customers several months to work out how they’re going to migrate their workloads to an alternative platform,” Mueller said. “Generally, most cloud vendors will only give their customers 30 days notice when they decide to sunset a service.”

King added that many of the institutions currently using IBM’s Cloud for Education may well be better served with the more customizable offerings that IBM recommended, such as Citrix and Dizzion. “That said, while this service is closing shop, IBM Cloud continues to offer educational institutions, academics, researchers and students a variety of solutions, including the IBM Academic Initiative that enables students to register for a trial of IBM Cloud without providing any payment details.”

The shutdown may have a somewhat negative impact on IBM’s cloud reputation though, given how it has struggled to achieve the same kind of success as its rivals, Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp., Google LLC and even Oracle Corp. The venerable tech company had grand ambitions when it acquired the infrastructure-as-a-service firm SoftLayer Technologies Inc. for $2 billion in 2013, intending to use it as the foundation of its cloud services.

Unfortunately, SoftLayer didn’t scale up or operate as well as IBM had envisioned, and the company ultimately dropped that brand in 2016. IBM reorganized its IaaS offerings under the Bluemix banner and later rebranded everything as IBM Cloud, but it has struggled to make much of an impact to this day.

In 2018, IBM acquired the open-source software pioneer Red Hat Inc. for $34 billion in a bid to revamp its cloud offerings, but that has done little to boost IBM’s reputation in the cloud market.

Photo: Patrick/Flickr