Published via Inbox: 2013-05-04 13:46:53
May 4, 2013 06:46
The idea is to take OpenStack, which is now robust and scalable enough for enterprise consumption, and contribute to the OpenStack project to make it even better. Executives at Monday's Pulse 2013 event said that IBM had over 500 IBMers contributing to the OpenStack project, that it has over 3,000 employees trained up on how to implement cloud control freaks (of all kinds, not just SCE and OpenStack), and that it has a customer advisory council of 400 different companies that it is using to help it determine the feature set for the future OpenStack-based SmartCloud control freakage.
The first step that IBM will take is to turn OpenStack into something called SmartCloud Orchestrator. This will add runbook automation and a policy-based management engine to OpenStack as well as taking server configuration "recipes" and "cookbooks" written using the Chef tool and the "patterns of expertise" deployment methodologies from IBM's PureSystems family of servers and integrating them both with OpenStack.
It is not clear when IBM plans to roll OpenStack-based SmartCloud tools into its own public cloud, which is also called SmartCloud and which had doubled in 2012 to over 5,000 customers.
My Two Cents
IBM is such a smart company and this is especially true as it relates to its cloud strategy. Knowing that its IBM Smart Cloud Enterprise was lagging behind, IBM gets behind OpenStack and ends up adopting OpenStack as it future cloud platform for SCE. Immediately OpenStack takes IBM from middle school to grad school in terms of a mature cloud platform. IBM's reliance on OpenStack will allow them to leverage its existing customer base of 5,000 customers and go upstream to its worldwide enterprise customer base. Expect an explosion in the next 2-5 years. Maybe IBM will actually hit $7 billion in cloud generated gross revenue by 2015. Now is the time for a major land grab for cloud services, especially for enterprise customers. I see many winners in this market, not just IBM or Amazon's AWS or Rackspace. Cloud services is a very good place to be right now.
