IBM as revealed an expanded suite of OpenStack services designed to allow customers to integrate applications and data across hybrid clouds including public, dedicated and local cloud environments without vendor lock-in or costly customisation.
The tech giant claims the new IBM Cloud OpenStack Services enable clients and developers to build applications that “deliver security and scalability” to meet fluctuating business demands in a public cloud.
The offerings also include spikes in usage and big data requirements and combined with IBM’s existing offerings, clients and developers now have access to a broader set of OpenStack services.
Through the IBM Cloud OpenStack Services, developers and clients will be able to launch applications on local, on-premises installations and now on public clouds hosted on the SoftLayer infrastructure.
Done without changing code or configurations the final result is that developers can now build and test an application in a public cloud and use the interoperability of OpenStack to deploy that same application and data across hybrid clouds including public, dedicated and local.
“As a top contributor to OpenStack, IBM firmly believes that an open cloud architecture translates into significant cost savings for our clients and will rapidly expand the cloud marketplace,” says Dr Angel Diaz, VP of Cloud Architecture and Technology, IBM.
“By delivering a complete portfolio of OpenStack services to the market, we are enabling our clients with what they need to quickly move applications and data across multiple cloud environments without fear of getting locked into a single cloud environment.”
With cloud adoption on the rise, Dr Diaz says major business complexities are being formed as hundreds of clouds are created without the means to integrate applications and access data located in multiple locations, including their traditional data centres.
To address this, IBM has 500 developers dedicated to working on open cloud projects to bring new cloud innovations to market and according to Dr Diaz, stands tall as the only cloud provider to combine OpenStack for hybrid clouds including public, dedicated and local.
The new public cloud services that are in beta today bring new capabilities including the expansion of access to public cloud, the increase of speed and security and the importance of the network of data centres.
Dr Diaz believes the announcement “reinforces IBM's commitment to open cloud services”, where these offerings can be consumed though Bluemix and SoftLayer.
At present, IBM’s total cloud revenue - covering public, private and hybrid engagements - was US$7.7 billion over the previous 12 months at the end of March 2015, representing growth of more than 60 percent in first quarter 2015.
