IBM puts its Cloud Services on Open Standards

IBM has announced that its cloud services and software will be based on an open cloud architecture. This move will ensure innovation in cloud computing is not hampered by locking businesses into proprietary islands of unsecured and difficult-to-manage offerings. 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 the first step, the company unveiled a new cloud offering based on open cloud standards, including OpenStack that significantly speeds and simplifies managing an enterprise-grade cloud. For the first time, businesses have a core set of open source-based technologies to build enterprise-class cloud services that can be ported across hybrid cloud environments.

"Standardization supports the flexibility and scalability needs of the businesses. The winner here will be customers, who will not find themselves locked into any one vendor but be free to choose the best platform based on the best set of capabilities to meet their needs," said Vamsi Mudiam, Country Manager, Cloud Solutions, IBM India/South Asia.

Based on customer-driven requirements, the new software, called IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator, gives clients greater flexibility by removing the need to develop specific interfaces for different cloud services. With the new software, companies can 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.
 
IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator is now available through a beta program and is expected to be generally available later this year.