IBM and Amazon

Second Government Cloud Computing Survey

By G C Network | April 1, 2009

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of presenting at the Sys-con International Cloud Computing Expo in New York City. My presentation, The View from Government Cloud Computing Customers, reviewed…

Navy NGEN and Cloud Computing

By G C Network | April 1, 2009

I spent half of today in downtown DC at the Navy Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN) Industry Day.  In case you’re not familiar with NGEN, this project will be the follow-on…

An Ontology for Tactical Cloud Computing

By G C Network | March 25, 2009

This week I’ve had the pleasure of presenting at two fairly unique conferences. On Tuesday I was in San Diego at the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO) Workshop. SISO is…

Federal Cloud Computing Roadmap

By G C Network | March 24, 2009

ServerVault, a long time provider of IT hosting services to the Federal government, has been discussing cloud computing quite a bit with their current (and future) customers.  The repetitive nature…

Booz Allen Hamilton Lays Out Path To Cloud

By G C Network | March 23, 2009

Now that cloud computing is seen as a viable technology for the government marketplace, management consulting leader Booz Allen Hamilton is now providing cloud transition guidance. In his article “Cloud…

Is Sun Rising or Setting?

By G C Network | March 19, 2009

Today was strange. First Sun announces it’s open cloud computing platform. Sun Unveils Open Cloud Computing Platform “Sun on Wednesday announced plans to offer its own Open Cloud Platform, starting…

A Conversation with Emil Sayegh, Mosso General Manager

By G C Network | March 16, 2009

Last week, Mosso announced their new “Cloud Server” and “Cloud Sites” offerings. They also exited “Cloud Files” from beta, positioning themselves as a challenger to Amazon. With this as a…

Playing the Cloud Computing Wargame

By G C Network | March 12, 2009

Today at FOSE I tried my hand at balancing traditional IT, hybrid cloud offerings and commercial cloud offerings on a craps table. Just to set the scene, the Booz Allen…

Vivek Kundra Nominated for Federal CIO

By G C Network | March 10, 2009

Mr. Kundra’s quote from the Wall Street Journal says it all: “I’m a big believer in disruptive technology. If I went to the coffee shop, I would have more computing…

7th SOA for E-Government Conference

By G C Network | March 5, 2009

On April 28, 2009, Mitre will be holding its biannual SOA for E-Government Conference. This conference is one of the region’s premier opportunity for federal managers and MITRE Subject Matter…

According to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) site, you can now use DB2, Informix, WebSphere sMash, WebSphere Portal Server or Lotus Web Content Management on Amazon’s EC2 cloud.

“This relationship will enable you to bring your own IBM licenses to Amazon EC2, utilize IBM’s ‘Development’ AMIs, or leverage the ‘Production’ Amazon EC2 running IBM service. All of these options will enable you to get started quickly using popular IBM platform technologies in the Amazon EC2 environment.”

To me, this move was clearly focused at besting Microsoft’s Azure platform into the cloud and represents a huge leap forward for this nascent industry. Now an enterprise can easily use these IBM products as a utility. As IBM adds more of their products into the mix, cloud transition offerings (enterprise-to-cloud or cloud-to enterprise) will follow.

This also represents a huge turning point for cloud interoperability. IBM’s enterprise footprint paired with Amazon’s established lead in infrastructure-as-a-service could create a de facto standard within the cloud computing community.

I’m not sure if this is good or bad, but it is definitely a huge event.
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