RSSIBM provides EC2 versions of server software
IBM announced today that they will be providing packaged EC2 machine images of some of their most popular business software packages, including DB2, Websphere, and Informix Dynamics, for use on Amazon's cloud-computing platform. The company also promises eventual integration of its Tivoli management software to manage the EC2 instances, allowing users to draw together their local and cloud-based resources under one coherent management umbrella.
Instances are currently available for free for testing and development purposes, and production images will be launched in beta (when did "production" and "beta" start to overlap?) in the coming months.
IBM has been working on its own cloud computing initiatives, but with typical Big Blue plodding, it has not come close to the offerings that more fleet developers have been able to produce, so the Amazon deal is probably the best possible way for IBM to transition their software portfolio to a utility computing basis. There has been considerable question recently whether or not traditional software manufacturers, led by Microsoft, would be able to transition their existing platforms successfully to a utility computing environment. Microsoft has opted for a mixed model and to produce its own cloud service, Azure, in-house, but there are glimmerings of failure in those efforts already (although the game is hardly over). IBM may be able to vault over the sort of problems that Microsoft and others will experience in attempting to transition their cultures to the more flexible development and operating processes needed to match cloud development/deployment cycles. By partnering with Amazon, IBM will greatly minimize the adaptation required in order to successfully enter the utilicy computing market.
Pricing has not been announced for the services as yet.
