IBM taps Amazon to further extend cloud offerings

Just one day after IBM made several announcements related to a new cloud computing initiative, the company said it would offer software to clients and developers on Amazon Web Services under a "pay-as-you-go" model. In a release, the company said:

Businesses today are looking for ways to quickly build, deploy and take advantage of the flexibility that cloud computing environments can bring. This is challenging for organizations that are constrained by limited resources, technical skills and capital, as they look to their IT infrastructure to help them gain a competitive advantage. IBM and Amazon Web Services are helping to address these challenges by making it easier for software developers to build solutions based on open standards and backed up by the necessary technical resources to help simplify the process.

The software titles that will be available are IBM DB2, Informix Dynamic Server, WebSphere Portal, Lotus Web Content Management, WebSphere sMash and Novell's SUSE Linux operating system. The software will be launched in beta later this year and pricing has yet to be announced. Users will be charged an hourly rate for usage.

Yesterday, IBM made several announcements related to cloud computing, including the appointment of a cloud computing czar and a partnership with Juniper Networks to create a hybrid environment between private clouds and remote servers in a secure public cloud across IBM’s 13 worldwide cloud labs.