Charles King, principal analyst, Pund-IT, says he was struck by IBM's focus on cloud provisioning/management simplification and automation. "That wasn't a surprise considering the Pulse audience, and it also plays particularly well to IBM's historic strengths in systems/facilities management. But the fact is that 'virtual sprawl' that's common in highly virtualized IT infrastructures is likely to increase by orders of magnitude as companies move more fully into cloud-based processes. Helping those companies effectively manage and keep up with the rapid changes inherent in cloud environments should become a lucrative market for IBM."
Analyst Amy Wohl, editor, Amy Wohl's Opinions, thinks the breadth of IBM's cloud portfolio is most significant. "Also [significant is] their initial announcements about support for the hybrid cloud environment, including support for moving applications and data between Amazon and IBM private clouds, as well as IBM public and private clouds."
She says the most important takeaway from Pulse 2012 is the change of emphasis from "Why cloud?" to how to implement many kinds of workloads on clouds. King says IBM customers and competitors need to understand that the company is playing well and competing aggressively across multiple existing markets, and adapting quickly to the changes it sees ahead.
"For customers, that means that IBM should be a valuable, trusted partner both today and for years to come. For competitors, it means that attacking IBM with simplistic point products and hyperbolic rhetoric is a losing proposition. If those vendors can't step up their games and their solution sets, the future is likely to be even uglier than are their present circumstances."
From a whole market standpoint, IBM is just one of numerous vendors trying to claim a piece of the cloud computing opportunity, so it's important to consider the company in the context of its competition, says King. "Among systems vendors like HP and Oracle, IBM clearly seems to be in a solid leadership position across numerous markets--its middleware/software assets are miles ahead of HP, and its hardware platforms are drubbing Oracle and HP's Itanium systems. The one vendor IBM tends to ignore is Dell, and I think that's probably a mistake, particularly in relation to the cloud."
So far as the heterogeneous system management solutions that were the primary focus at Pulse, many other vendors, including CA and BMC, are formidable players, King adds. "Bottom line for IBM and its customers/prospects: The company has strong, innovative, highly integrated offerings across the entire cloud landscape, but they are not alone there."
Disclaimer: Yes I attended Pulse courtesy of IBM. And yes, I maintained my editorial integrity, despite the company's generosity.
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