IBM joins the cloud computing crowd

IBM is the latest tech firm to jump on the cloud computing bandwagon, announcing a new services initiative.

IBM said it will offer its own cloud service, provide cloud computing environments to businesses, and help clients integrate cloud services into existing systems. It will also help ISVs design, build and market their own cloud offerings.

"We are moving our clients, the industry and even IBM itself to have a mixture of data and applications that live in the data center and in the cloud," said Willy Chiu, vice president of high performance on demand solutions at IBM.

This will initially show up in the form of Bluehouse, a free beta of a web-based social networking and cloud service, which lets users share documents and other data across firewalls.

IBM is also pushing Lotus Sametime Unyte, a web conferencing and document sharing system, as well as two security products. The first, Rational Policy Tester OnDemand, scans web content, while the second, AppScan OnDemand, does just what it says on the tin and scans web-based applications.

“IBM’s cloud computing strategy was inspired by feedback from the business world’s broadest IT customer base indicating a growing desire to utilise data, applications and services from any device and from any location, based on open standards," Chiu said.

It’s likely the move was also inspired by its competitors moving into cloud computing. Amazon is set to allow Microsoft products on its cloud-related services, while VMware and Microsoft have announced cloud operating systems.

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