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IBM takes to Amazon's EC2 cloud

IBM is making some software available via Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Other software vendors will surely follow, now that Big Blue has stepped onto the cloud.

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Dave Rosenberg Co-founder, MuleSource
Dave Rosenberg has more than 15 years of technology and marketing experience that spans from Bell Labs to startup IPOs to open-source and cloud software companies. He is CEO and founder of Nodeable, co-founder of MuleSoft, and managing director for Hardy Way. He is an adviser to DataStax, IT Database, and Puppet Labs.
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Dave Rosenberg
2 min read

IBM and Amazon.com announced that they are now providing pay-as-you-go access to development and production versions of IBM Information Management database servers, IBM Lotus content management, and IBM WebSphere portal and middleware products.

This is interesting as it shows that IBM understands that people want to consume software in the cloud, but it's not clear that anyone is currently interested. But the fact is, if they don't build it, then no one will come.

The full list of currently available IBM software available on EC2.

  • IBM DB2
  • IBM Informix Dynamic Server
  • IBM Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition
  • IBM WebSphere Portal Server

As a tech bellwether, it's also important for IBM to set the method by which it offers its cloud-based software so that other can follow suit. Pricing and deployment options have varied a bit between large software vendors which leads to customer confusion.

Existing IBM customers can use the licenses they've already bought while still taking advantage of the elastic nature of (Amazon Web Services) to handle spikes and peaks. These licenses retain their value and can be used to handle steady state processing needs, with more licenses available (on an hourly basis) in the cloud for peak times.

This clean and innovative new model should clear up some of the uncertainty which can cause potential users to think twice before jumping in to cloud computing. A new IBM PVU (processor value unit) table will map between PVUs and the full set of available EC2 instance types. See our new IBM partner page for details.