IBM and Microsoft Pledge Cloud Interoperability
One of the biggest fears of CIOs and technology executives alike is vendor lock in. When organizations get deeply entrenched into a product line up, they quickly find that one product lineup may not mesh with a competitors. This can cause a disruption within your technology ranks because certain tools do certain tasks better than others. IBM and Microsoft have signified that they have agreed to ensure that their cloud computing technologies will be interoperable as a courtesy to its customers.
Michael Curry, the VP of IBM’s WebSphere product said, “The cloud is an interesting change in the technology landscape. In a lot of ways it opens everybody up to be your partner as well as your competitor, more so than on premise software did in the past.” Curry continued, “The key element here is about offering choice for our customers—to have the flexibility to deploy software in lots of different places.”
IBM notes that its WebSphere app server, WebSphere MQ bus and the DB2 database will begin to be available within Microsoft Azure. Inside of IBM’s cloud, Microsoft products such as Windows Server and SQL Server will begin to be availabile. IBM also denoted that the .NET runtime would also be available within the Bluemix platform.
IBM’s Curry was further quoted as saying “We want to attract .NET developers to understand the power of Bluemix to build a new class of cloud applications.” Systems administrators that use Microsoft Hyper-V will be able to implement that technology within IBM’s cloud. Conversely, IBM’s Pure Application Service will be available within Azure. Pure Application Service is IBM’s take on packaging and distributing sets of applications. Although IBM’s SoftLayer already offers many Microsoft services currently, users of both SoftLayer and Azure will begin to see more features within each of the respective administration panels within the next few weeks.
