IBM this week clarified its plans to handhold enterprises into the cloud, working with Red Hat to bypass VMware with the announcement of Smart Business Development & Test on the IBM Cloud.
I have been talking for a while about what I call The VMware Pattern, in posts such as Amazon Web Services: an instance of weakness as strength.
Amazon is the new VMware. The adoption patterns are going to similar. Enterprise will see AWS as a test and development environment first, but over time production workloads will migrate there.
It makes a great deal of sense to encourage its customers to adopt the pattern. That is – start with test, and go from there. Don’t tell the customer to immediately migrate everything to, and run everything on, the cloud. Which would of course be insane. On the contrary recommend a low barrier to entry approach. Production is an end state where the customer finally just says: “remind me again why we aren’t using this flexible infrastructure as a production environment?” That’s the VMware Pattern. Which I may have to rename the AWS pattern… 
In the meantime though, according to IBM Research, the average IT department devotes up to 50% of its technology infrastructure to development and test, with up to 90% of that infrastructure remaining idle most of the time.
Sounds like a job for virtualisation… or the cloud.
As Dave Rosenberg points out:
“Testing services are an excellent use-case for cloud services, and a number of start-ups including Sauce Labs and SOASTA have offerings that allow customers to test their applications without having to build a massive test infrastructure.”
HP Mercury has to find the VMware Pattern pretty galling. “What do you mean you don’t plan to buy any test servers”.
VMware may have owned the (x86) virtualisation wave, but with cloud everything is in play again.
For a cloud integration company like Appirio this stuff seems old hat at best. Thus for Balakrishna Narasimh aka appirio_nara:
at #cloudconnect hearing IBM. Feels like 3 years ago – all talk focused on dev and test environments in the cloud
But for the mainstream, for IBM’s customers, its very early days indeed. Cloud is far from mainstream. Public clouds are scary, and full of FUD. Development and test though is a toe in the water, with IBM holding the customers hand, and of course recommending a range of related products and services – step forward Rational Software Delivery Services for Cloud Computing v1.0.
Just to show IBM is keeping up with the cool kids, one early customer is Paypal, which according to IBM’s press release is using the offering as the basis for a collaborative environment for its own developers. IBM hosting a developer cloud for PayPal – that’s not bad for a “cloud laggard”. IBM partners for the launch include RightScale (an acknowledged cloud leader, and the aforementioned SOASTA).
For those skeptical of Red Hat’s role in the service, its certainly worth pointing out that Amazon Web Services runs on Red Hat – it makes sense to adopt the same infrastructure as the de facto market leader.
I am quietly impressed.
disclosure: IBM is a client. Amazon, HP, VMware and Red Hat are not.
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