IBM moves into mission-critical cloud services with SmartCloud

IBM is expanding its SmartCloud portfolio with new capabilities to enable mission-critical workloads to be moved to the cloud, plus bundled solutions to help organisations quickly deploy cloud infrastructure and extensions to its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings for application deployment.

Among a broad range of new capabilities, IBM unveiled SmartCloud Foundation, pre-packaged private cloud solutions for rapid deployment, industry-specific SmartCloud Solutions tailored to the requirements of industry sectors, and SmartCloud Application Services designed to deliver middleware as a service.

The SmartCloud Application Services will run on IBM's SmartCloud Enterprise or new Enterprise+ platforms, the latter of which is the industry's first enterprise-class infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering designed for critical workloads and backed by service level agreements, according to IBM.

"This is about starting to move into the mission-critical enterprise space, it's about providing IBM's security, reliability and flexibility, and starting to build capabilities with partners to address the mission-critical space that our clients are looking at," said Laura Colvine, cloud strategy leader for IBM UK & Ireland.

However, SmartCloud Enterprise+ is due to be phased in gradually over the next several quarters, IBM said, starting with the US. It is not expected to be available in Europe before the first quarter of 2012.

With this foundation, IBM is also able to deliver mission-critical applications via SmartCloud Application Services, which Colvine described as providing middleware-as-a-service on which customers and partners can build enterprise applications.

"We're starting to bring more visibility in the market place of the work we are doing with partners such as SAP, for example, to enable SAP workloads and use cases within a secure and reliable cloud-provisioned environment," she said.

Partners also feature highly in IBM's SmartCloud Solutions. The firm said it is looking to partners to tailor its services to meet the specific requirements of customers in particular industry sectors, such as government, healthcare and education.