IBM announced last week their entry into the lofty realm of cloud computing with the introduction of a program called "Blue Cloud" for corporate data centers. Blue Cloud, running on (what else?) IBM BladeCenters and managed and provisioned by (what else?) IBM's Tivoli software, comes largely out of the corporation's other forays into massively parallel computing and promises to be informed with a characteristically IBM slant toward large enterprise, big iron operations. It will be the first of the cloud offerings to support PowerPC architecture and System z mainframe systems.

Inevitably, Blue Cloud is being compared to Amazon's Web Services, but from the information available so far, it appears to be a different sort of animal and quite understandably so. AWS came about as a means of leveraging Amazon's existing, necessarily massive, computing and storage back end; Blue Cloud seems to be deliberately positioned as a solution for companies like Amazon, which have the motivation and capacity to build their own cloud in-house, but perhaps not the framework.

While many commentators are viewing this as a tipping point for cloud computing I think it's both premature and a little behind the times to say so. Cloud computing probably hit the tipping point when Google went big, or perhaps when Amazon started renting out server time; on the other hand, the thing that Blue Cloud really may presage is enterprise cloud computing, which is something that may be quite a way off, or possibly never come to pass. IBM's toolset might enable other organizations to more easily compete with AWS if that's the market they want to be in, but I think it's questionable whether or not even larger enterprises really need to bring cloud computing in-house.

Still, one should not discount the ability that IBM brings to the table to make corporate IT players feel comfortable with a concept, to the extent they are willing to pay two or three times as much as they might elsewhere for a similar product or service. With that in mind, it's clear at least that IBM's foray into the market should make more businesses more comfortable with the concept in general of cloud-based computing.