Image representing IBM as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

As widely expected, IBM will this week unveil a new Cloud Computing Division and a set of technological solutions intended to appeal directly to large enterprise customers currently wary of entrusting their mission-critical services to the Cloud.

Various sites carry the story this morning, including the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal‘s Digits blog and TechCrunch.

The Wall Street Journal quotes Erich Clementi, the incoming head of IBM’s new Division;

“‘Since customers are looking for new economics, this might be a good moment for clouds,’ Mr. Clementi … said in an interview. He described his area of operations as ‘a new way of delivering IT as a service,’ that can be cheaper and simpler than adding capacity in a data center.”

Building upon existing trust relationships with customers for their Tivoli line, IBM will offer an ‘overflow cloud’ that allows customers to automatically push demanding jobs from their own data centres to IBM’s.

Along with a ‘resiliency service’ that makes it easier for customers to lodge backups of mission critical local services in remote IBM data centres, these moves are clearly small steps that help IBM begin the process of gradually weaning its more traditional customers off their own infrastructure and into an ongoing relationship with IBM-managed services in the Cloud.

Although not that remarkable a set of announcements, this move by IBM will go a long way toward reassuring those large corporates that have – so far – treated the Cloud with some suspicion. IBM (and a revived offering from Sun) carry far more weight with these companies than all the best efforts of ‘upstarts’ such as Amazon, RightScale et al with their SMB-friendly image and product.

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