IBM’s New Cloud Data Centers and the Global Cloud Wars

by Jim Lundy

IBM announced last week that it has added 18 new cloud zones to support the growing demand for cloud. This is a significant move and prepares it well for the war for both public and private cloud.

New Data Centers in Australia, U.S., Germany, and Japan

IBM is adding three data centers in six different cities: Dallas, Washington, London, Frankfurt, Sydney, and Tokyo. This is intended to expand their growing Hybrid Cloud business and enable enterprises to begin the transition to public cloud.

These nine new data centers boost the available resources to IBM’s growing set of cloud customers and positions them well against Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in the growing cloud wars.

IBM Doubles Down on Containerization with Kubernetes

IBM has doubled down on its support for the open-container standard called Kubernetes, which has been promoted by Google and is now supported by nearly every major cloud provider. Its IBM cloud container service is based on Kubernetes and allows containerized apps to now run on bare-metal servers. In addition, IBM supports major databases that have been more premise-based, including DB2, SQLBase, PostreSQL, and NoSQL—all popular choices for customers.

Adding Watson AI to IBM Cloud Offers

One of the opportunities for enterprises is to leverage IBM Watson on-premise and in the cloud, something that other cloud providers don’t yet offer. IBM has been opening up its options for Watson and given the flexibility and the different options for Watson, this may be one of the difference makers for IBM going forward.

Competing to Win the Cloud Wars

So, IBM, after being late to the cloud game, is in the cloud wars in a big way. The challenge is to drive more customers to IBM and that means a significant focus on sales and marketing is needed to counter what Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are doing. Microsoft, for example, is paying vendors to migrate their applications to Azure.

There is a lot more to come in the cloud wars and this is a great step forward for IBM.