IBM has expanded availability for its cloud service to five continents
IT software giant IBM announced on Tuesday it has expanded availability for its SmartCloud service to five continents, as well as opened a new data center in Spain to host SAP applications and other core operations.
IBM first launched the set of cloud services aimed at managed service providers and mid-sized businesses in September, putting it in competition with cloud leaders like Amazon, Salesforce, and Rackspace.
IBM’s infrastructure-as-a-service cloud offering, IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+, offers cloud computing benefits of elasticity and subscription-based pricing.
IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+ offers the same level of assurance typically associated with a hosted service so that clients can always access core applications for ERP, CRM, analytics, social business and mobile computing from the cloud.
The cloud service helps manage patch updates and identity management, improving security, which is considered one of the greatest barriers to cloud adoption.
“This is a logical evolution of IBM’s sourcing business that gives us an advantage both in our services relationships and the cloud market as we define a new enterprise-grade cloud today,” said Jim Comfort, general manager of IBM SmartCloud Services. “Our clients want sophisticated, economical cloud-based services that provide the same quality and service level as a private, hosted IT environment. With that assurance, they can focus more on driving business value from their data and operations, and less on managing their IT.”
IBM is also offering global availability of its enterprise service, IBM SmartCloud for SAP Applications, which automates and standardizes provisioning of IT environments, and can accelerate service delivery.
The SmartCloud services for SAP applications delivers nearly 100 percent availability to support cloud-based systems around the clock. The service is available for SAP Business Suite software and the SAP BusinessObjects solution portfolio as an enterprise-class, fully managed PaaS service for running SAP solutions in a production environment.
Combining its global business services expertise, tools and processes with SmartCloud for SAP applications, IBM will deliver LifeCycle as a Service to transform implementations of SAP applications end to end.
The service puts the responsibility and control of the SAP applications in IBM’s hands, fully managing all tasks of the process including software patching of SAP solutions and support for the underlying operating system, database and middleware.
Clients may establish their SAP solutions development and test operations on IBM’s public cloud service, SmartCloud Enterprise, then move the SAP applications to the SCE+ platform for production.
IBM is offering SCE+ from its cloud centers in Japan, Brazil, Canada, France, Australia, the U.S. and Germany, enabling clients to choose the geographic location of where their data resides.
IBM opened its first cloud center in Barcelona, Spain to service clients worldwide, which will be in operation by mid-2013. Enterprise+ helps clients move to cloud more quickly and cost effectively by determining which workloads are best suited to the SmartCloud Enterprise+ environment.
Talk back: Are you interested in using IBM’s cloud services? Do you think IBM is able to compete against more established cloud providers? Let us know in the comments.
About Justin Lee
Justin Lee has been a staff analyst with theWHIR since 2004. He writes about a range of web hosting and IT-related issues facing the industry on the WHIR website, as well the print version of the WHIR magazine. Follow him on Twitter @Justin_theWHIR.
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Good to know that IBM has started a datacenter in Spain. IBM is a reputed and established brand in the industry. Many people would not mind trying IBM’s cloud service. I think IBM would clinch a big share of Cloud market.