In a move that could have far-reaching implications for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) standards, IBM announced that its new cloud services and software will be based on an open cloud architecture. The move is designed to ensure that innovation in cloud computing is not hampered by locking businesses into proprietary islands of unsecured and difficult-to-manage offerings.
IBM maintains that without industry-wide open standards for cloud computing, businesses will not be able to fully take advantage of the opportunities associated with interconnected data, such as mobile computing and big data.
As a first step in this new policy, IBM also unveiled a new cloud offering, IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator, based on open cloud standards that is designed to speed and simplify the management of an enterprise-grade cloud. The new cloud offering provides businesses with a core set of open source-based technologies that can build enterprise-class cloud services and which can be ported across hybrid cloud environments.
“History has shown that standards and open source are hugely beneficial to end customers and are a major catalyst for innovation,” said Robert LeBlanc, IBM senior vice president of software. “Just as standards and open source revolutionized the Web and Linux, they will also have a tremendous impact on cloud computing.”
IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator, which is based on customer-driven requirements, is designed to give clients greater flexibility by removing the need to develop specific interfaces for different cloud services. With the new software, companies will be able to quickly combine and deploy various cloud services onto the cloud infrastructure by lining up the compute, storage and network resources with an easy-to-use graphical interface.
A few of the abilities the new IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator provides to users include:
- The ability to build new cloud services in minutes by combining the power of pattern-based cloud delivery, with a graphical orchestrator for simple composition of cloud automation.
- Reduce operational costs by automating application deployment and lifecycle management in the cloud (i.e. compute, storage and network configuration, human task automation, and integration with third party tools,) delivered by an integrated cloud management platform.
- And simplify the end user consumption of cloud services, via an intuitive self-service portal, including the ability to measure the cost of cloud services with metering and charge-back capabilities.
Additionally, IBM suggests that the development of open industry standards has proven a critical turning point in the success of many technologies, such as the Internet and operating systems. For cloud computing to grow and mature similar to its predecessors, vendors must stop creating new cloud services that are incompatible. The company sites a recent report by Booz & Company warned that without a more concerted effort to agree on such standards, and leadership on the part of major companies, the promise of cloud computing may never be reached.
CLO Inside Track: IBM’s decision to embrace an open cloud architecture could trigger a paradigm shift in the industry – particularly when IBM migrates its 5,000-plus private-cloud customers over to the new Open Stack architecture. Although we saw the writing on the wall when IBM contributed its code base to the OpenStack Foundation in 2012, the IBM announcement is good news for customers seeking vendor-agnostic solutions. While it’s too early to assess the full impact, Amazon can’t be happy with a standards-focused Big Blue taking on its AWS public cloud.
(For additional information contact: IBM, 415-545-4003, www.ibm.com; Booz & Company, 703-905-4000, www.booz.com; http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ibm-to-make-its-cloud-services-and-software-based-on-open-standards-194985451.html.)
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