IBM’s Cloud Plan for 2014
IBM plans to storm the corporate cloud market. Recently, IBM bought out SoftLayer for $2B. This acquisition positions IBM to make a big leap in 2014 which has led industry analysts to question whether or not Amazon’s model is at risk of losing market share. If IBM has any say in the matter, the company will certainly do its best to take away market share from the cloud giant because IBM vocally says that Amazon is its arch rival in the cloud computing world.
In 2014, IBM is set to release up to 40 different infrastructure services and over 100 new products inside the cloud. Lance Crosby is the Chief Executive at SoftLayer. In relation to the 2014 plans of IBM, Crosby was quoted as saying, “It will take Amazon 10 years to build all of this. People will be creating businesses with this that we can only dream about.” IBM bought out SoftLayer for $2B earlier this year. SoftLayer uses OpenStack to facilitate its cloud offerings. IBM recently asked 400 of its employees to assist the OpenStack open source development community in creating a cloud backbone that will compete against the likes of proprietary systems such as Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure. Industry analysts think that the influence of IBM employees on the OpenStack development team will be positive and give OpenStack the same type of boost that the Linux operating system received as it was infiltrated by IBM developers back in the early 90s.
IBM has a huge advantage as opposed to other competitors it might go up against. IBM has a lot of free cash and after the business almost went under in the 1990s, the company has the motivation to stay ahead of the curve. With this motivation, IBM looks to accelerate its position and acquire a larger slice of the cloud computing market share.
