Computerworld - Looking to allay corporate IT misgivings about hosted computing services, IBM and Dell earlier this month unveiled tools that focus on helping companies build and use more secure and reliable private and public clouds.
The IBM and Dell announcements came just weeks after Hewlett-Packard announced a so-called infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud offering for both consumers and businesses.
IBM introduced two tiers of cloud services under the name SmartCloud, while Dell announced plans to spend $1 billion this year to build data centers that support cloud services for corporate customers. Dell also said it's building preconfigured, pretested and pre-validated systems to help customers create in-house private clouds.
Dell is likely to focus initially on small to midsize users.
IBM's Enterprise IaaS offering lets customers deploy Windows- or Linux-based software from IBM data centers with 99.5% uptime guaranteed. Its Enterprise Plus service has additional security and promises 99.9% uptime.
The company is looking to further attract the attention of enterprises by adding support for high-end SAP ERP applications. Ric Telford, vice president of cloud services at IBM, said that the cloud offering will let SAP users dynamically provision instances on demand, and it will elastically scale. IBM has also bundled hardware and management software products, including numerous Tivoli and Systems Director tools, so they can be run from an internal cloud.
"There's nothing about the attributes [of cloud services] that you can't implement inside a business," said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive in charge of IBM's software division.
Given that even the IBM customers who attended the company's Cloud Forum event in San Francisco earlier this month are either not yet using cloud-based services or are still in the early stages, analysts say the strategy makes sense.
Tony Kerrison, CTO at financial services firm ING, said his company runs "zero" applications today that are hosted in the public cloud.
Like other financial services companies, Amsterdam-based ING is heavily bound by regulatory requirements, and by strict European Union rules about where its customer data can be stored. Even putting email in the cloud, which is first on Kerrison's wish list, will be "a challenge" because of the regulatory issues, he said in an interview at the IBM event.
Meanwhile, health care company Kaiser Permanente "dipped [its] toes" into cloud computing this year, said Carlos Matos, senior director for infrastructure management and systems integration. Scott Skellenger, senior director for global IT operations at life sciences firm Illumina, declined to say what, if any, applications his company is running in the cloud.
Other top vendors still have a window of opportunity to make a serious push into the cloud computing business. The cloud services market is "highly fragmented," said IDC analyst Matt Eastwood. "There is still room for everyone."
Niccolai is a reporter for the IDG News Service. Robert McMillan of the IDG News Service contributed to this story.
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