[johnward]

Speaking as a former IBMer. I understand IBM wanting to be a player in the cloud space but I'm not sure they ever will be. Like who seriously uses IBM Cloud? I know some big corps probably accidentally get IBM cloud credits with their large IBM contracts but does anyone actually choose IBM in this space?

[kache_]

Also a former IBMer. IBM cloud has really good compliance for "legacy type" customers. Things like banks and governments where all of the hoops discredit other cloud providers.

[VHRanger]

So does azure, but azure is not a joke

[treis]

Much of IT spending is controlled by people that aren't technical and don't really understand what they're buying. No tech firm is going to choose IBM cloud but plenty of corporations will.

[Aperocky]

Anyone who has been connected to the internet knows the current cloud standards are set by AWS and Azure (maybe with Google and Oracle thrown in there as decorations).

[libria]

Even for non-tech corporations, only those with the grayest of hair would consider IBM branding a safer bet than AWS/Azure.

[mrweasel]

IBM bought the best hosting company, at the time, SoftLayer, and transformed it into a the absolute worst.

I see where they’re going, if they’re trying to learn from what went wrong with SoftLayer. IBM culture destroyed SoftLayer, so if they want another go at cloud, they do need that business to stay VERY fare away from the traditional IBM and their consulting business.

[pm90]

Softlayer was a one trick pony. They had the best bare metals in the market. But their product was very poorly built and extremely hard to scale out or add features to.

This is not unexpected. Startups will optimize for a few use cases and deliver, get acquired on those strengths only for the acquiring company to realize that ... the tech isn’t easily scalable.

[vl]

Oracle tried cloud couple times and failed, and finally they opened huge cloud division in Seattle away from corporate mothership.

[LinuxBender]

It also depends on what they mean by cloud. If cloud is their Softlayer acquisition, I am not impressed.

I would love to see them build out a real cloud solution, perhaps even using datacenters full of their z15's. I can't imagine anyone competing with that on commodity hardware in terms of deployment speed and connectivity speed between instances in the same location. It would be crazy expensive though and I doubt they would ever consider it and someone at IBM would have to write a web interface / API into the system that mimics the options of all the current cloud providers.

[pm90]

They acquired RedHat, and with that came Openshift.

[karambahh]

I heard (from IBM sales people) that they do sell cloud services to banks.

They are slowly replacing the mainframe contracts by (private) cloud contracts

[hchz]

My unit in IB bought such a thing and didn't do anything with the multi-million dollar outlay over the two years I was there.

[nunez]

I’ll take a guess. DB2, mainframe, and Watson?