IBM's New Cloud Capabilities Empower Business Partners

IBM (News - Alert) announced it is launching a comprehensive set of capabilities to help its partners quickly adopt cloud business models and generate new revenue streams. The new offerings will empower the company's partners of all types to offer public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructures, applications and services to their clients.

The news signals a significant commitment to IBM's business partner community in helping them ramp up and participate in the industry shift to cloud computing by building new solutions that take advantage of IBM cloud services as well as help clients make the most of their IT investments.

The IBM SmartCloud portfolio will be extended with two new public cloud services to aid partners, ISVs, system integrators, telecommunications companies and more with delivering their enterprise solutions as cloud services. The SmartCloud Enterprise+ solution offers an enterprise-class IaaS featuring governance, administration and management control, multiple security and isolation options. These are built into the virtual infrastructure and network real business-centric SLAs are also included. The offering will be available to qualified IBM Business Partners for resell in the first half of 2012.

SmartCloud Applications Services will enable enterprise applications to be quickly offered as a cloud service through a set of secure and flexible tools. The SmartCloud Application Service beta program is available for interested ISVs. Key enhancements to the IBM SmartCloud portfolio include a white label option so that business partners may launch branded services based on SmartCloud Enterprise.

The company is also launching the SmartCloud Foundation, a family of private cloud solutions. The offerings will aid clients of all sizes in designing and deploying private cloud environments. They are geared toward SMBs and may be accessed by business partners through the IBM PartnerWorld channel reseller programs.

Solutions include the IBM SmartCloud Entry, which is delivered by the IBM Starter Kit for Cloud. The package offers the building blocks to create private clouds on virtualized IBM System x and Power Systems hardware. It also offers simplified initialization and administration as well as a self-service interface.

IBM SmartCloud Provisioning software provides a powerful provisioning engine and image management system for dynamic creation and provisioning of virtual machines. The software can create from hundreds to more than 4,000 virtual machines in less than an hour. IBM SmartCloud Monitoring offers greater visibility into the performance of virtual and physical environments, including storage, network and server resources.

A Cloud Assessment tool is also being offered free of charge to help IBM independent software vendors get ready to transform their business models through the cloud. Additionally, the company is offering workshops and training programs to its partners via its network of global cloud labs and 40 IBM Innovation Centers located in 33 countries.

“We are committed to the success of our business partners and our goal is to continue to collaborate with them to bring innovative solutions to our joint clients across industries,” said Rich Hume, general manager, IBM Global Business Partners. “To seize this opportunity, IBM has laid the foundation for a comprehensive set of cloud offerings which IBM Business Partners, who are key to our growth strategy, can take to market to help these clients address their cloud needs as their businesses grow.”