IBM Drives Cloud Adoption Through Ecosystem, Open Support

LAS VEGAS, Feb. 24, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it is accelerating the adoption of cloud computing through growth in the ecosystem that includes working with key open technology organizations that are focused on simplifying and speeding application deployment on the cloud.

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Specifically, IBM was just named as a founding member of jQuery, home to a JavaScript community committed simplifying coding tasks.  By joining the jQuery Foundation, IBM continues an ongoing commitment to contribute to open technology efforts critical to today's leading open cloud architectures. jQuery simplifies how the industry builds web applications. IBM uses jQuery broadly across its portfolio, including its popular IBM MobileFirst platform for Enterprise Mobile Solutions. 

In addition, IBM will join Pivotal and a number of other companies to establish the Cloud Foundry to help drive global collaboration with developers and cloud computing technologists. In doing so, they will seek to produce a ubiquitous Platform-as-a-Service open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. IBM will also be a platinum-level sponsor for Cloud Foundry and will become a member of its board of directors, taking an active role in developing and promoting the Cloud Foundry project.

"Independent foundations like Cloud Foundry and jQuery are important steps toward building an industry-wide open cloud architecture and simplify how Web-based applications are built and deployed," said Dr. Angel Diaz, IBM's Vice President Open Technology and Cloud Performance Solutions. "To support this, IBM will join these foundations and take an active role in developing and promoting both communities."

Additionally, IBM continues to drive industry adoption of the OASIS Topology & Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) standard to address the demand for portability of workloads. TOSCA, co-chaired by IBM, is now gaining traction within the growing OpenStack HOT project. As the community explores alignment with TOSCA, they will demonstrate how cloud applications can be modeled, shared, deployed and managed, seamlessly, amongst products and cloud platforms, from multiple vendors.

IBM has also worked with Mirantis, pure-play OpenStack vendor, to demonstrate that SoftLayer^® is an excellent platform to build scalable, available and reliable OpenStack clouds for enterprises, partners and developers. Through the benchmark, SoftLayer's bare-metal infrastructure is a proven platform to run OpenStack at massive scale.

IBM's ongoing support of OpenStack as a founding and platinum sponsor and now Cloud Foundry, jQuery and TOSCA builds the company's legacy of supporting open standards and open source initiatives to provide value to clients and create a stronger ecosystem to fuel innovation and drive success.

To foster adoption for the cloud and other industry initiatives that IBM believes will speed growth, IBM's Ecosystem Development business unit (formerly known as IDR) works with a robust group of Business Partners, academics, entrepreneurs, and IT professionals to help them become "best of breed" on IBM platforms.

The ecosystem, now more than ever, is playing an important role in IBM's strategy and ability to drive client success. IBM clients today are demanding a more simplified approach to sophisticated technologies, including cloud, in an effort to address complex challenges in a range of industries from healthcare to retail.

By strengthening the ecosystem, IBM is encouraging collaboration with the breadth and depth designed to deliverskills and technologies to help bring innovative solutions to some of business and society's great challenges.

In fact, IBM continues to grow the ecosystem and is positioned to help business partners transform with Cloud by coordinating talent, acquisitions & R&D to build a comprehensive Cloud portfolio.

IBM Business Partners and ecosystem participants who have benefited and can benefit from cloud include:

• 100+ referring and selling partners for IBM SaaS portfolio
• Startups: 2000+ Members w/ Cloud Offerings
• Commercial Developers: 1250+ Cloud Solution ISVs; 1.6M Cloud developerWorks Profiles
• Individual Developers: 4800+ Cloud Communities on developerWorks
• Born on Cloud Partners: 1000+ Cloud based MSPs
• Business Partners: 1000+ Value-added Reseller and Distributors with an IBM Cloud mark
• Influencers: 200+ Champions on Cloud and related areas: Mobile, Social, Big Data
• Academia: 100 Universities, 200 Faculty, 2000+ Students in 20 Countries on Cloud

The ecosystem will also benefit from a number of recent moves IBM has made to enhance its cloud initiatives. This includes the company's $1.2 billion investment to expand its global cloud offerings. Now the ecosystem will have greater access to IBM cloud resources via a network of cloud centers that are designed to bring clients greater flexibility, transparency and control over how they manage their data, run their businesses and deploy their IT operations locally in the cloud.

IBM's acquisition of SoftLayer last year also accelerates the adoption of cloud and provides a faster and simpler "on ramp" for cloud for "born on the Web" businesses to adopt cloud services in a secure and open environment.

About IBM Cloud Computing
IBM is the global leader in cloud with an unmatched portfolio of open cloud solutions that help clients to think, build or tap into it.   No other company has the ability to bring together unique industry knowledge and unmatched cloud capabilities, that have already helped more than 30,000 clients around the world with 40,000 industry experts. Today, IBM has 100+ cloud SaaS solutions, thousands of experts with deep industry knowledge helping clients transform and a network of 40 data centers worldwide.  Since 2007, IBM has invested more than $7 billion in 16 acquisitions to accelerate its cloud initiatives and build a high value cloud portfolio. IBM holds 1,560 cloud patents focused on driving innovation. In fact, IBM for the 21st consecutive year topped the annual list of US patent leaders. IBM processes more the 5.5M client transactions daily through IBM's public cloud.  IBM expects to achieve $7 billion in annual cloud revenue by 2015. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/cloud. Follow us on Twitter at @IBMcloud and on our blog at http://www.thoughtsoncloud.com.  Join the conversation #ibmcloud. To learn more about today's news please read Smarter Planet blog.

Scott Cook
IBM Communications
[email protected] 
312.669.4743

SOURCE IBM