IBM ditches Bluemix branding

IBM Bluemix Logo

IBM rebranded its Bluemix offering earlier this week, re-naming the service IBM Cloud and announcing new services that will allow businesses to take advantage of its range of cloud-based products.

The company explained it's made everything much simpler for existing customers, introducing IBM Cloud Lite, a service that allows businesses to test out IBM Cloud services without being limited by time trials, and a new server ordering process that was announced back in September.

IBM's entire cloud-powered portfolio will now fit under the new umbrella, including its Watson AI tech, PaaS services and SaaS offerings, because the Bluemix and IBM Cloud brands have "grown to be synonomous," the company explained in a blog post.

"IBM Cloud offers the widest array of database options, from relational to NoSQL, while ensuring strong consistency, high integrity, and no delay," Michael Mendenhall, chief marketing officer of IBM Watson and Cloud Platform said. "IBM Cloud powers AI-intensive workloads that demand data integrity, low-latency and parallel processing. It also offers a broad range of Watson AI and machine learning APIs to build your own applications."

The company explained its full suite of cloud services will still be available to Bluemix customers, but the only change will be tweaks in the documentation of products, referring to IBM Cloud where it used to be Bluemix.

It would seem IBM just doesn't know what to name its cloud services. Last year, it killed off its SoftLayer name, replacing it with Bluemix. But now the company's marketing department obviously doesn't think Bluemix is particularly relevant now urging the Big Blue to just make it much simpler, calling it IBM Cloud instead.

Clare Hopping
Freelance writer

Clare is the founder of Blue Cactus Digital, a digital marketing company that helps ethical and sustainability-focused businesses grow their customer base.

Prior to becoming a marketer, Clare was a journalist, working at a range of mobile device-focused outlets including Know Your Mobile before moving into freelance life.

As a freelance writer, she drew on her expertise in mobility to write features and guides for ITPro, as well as regularly writing news stories on a wide range of topics.