From the application service provider model throught to software-as-a-service and on to the cloud, it can feel like we have seen it all before. But a utility computing milestone was passed earlier this month when IBM signed a deal with Amazon.com to sell applications on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), will rent out IBM DB2, Informix Dynamic Server, WebSphere Portal, Lotus Web Content Management and WebSphere sMash running on SUSE Linux via its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) environment. Existing users of the applications can also migrate their solutions to virtual servers rented from Amazon's cloud system.
Big Blue is giving away Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to tempt developers into building pre-production applications based on IBM software within Amazon EC2. IBM plans to add Tivoli software in the near future to help users control and automate their new cloud-based infrastructures.
IBM says it will launch beta software images for Amazon EC2 in the coming months, with pricing to be announced. Both developers and customers will be able to run development and production instances of IBM software for an hourly fee.
"IBM is offering yet another way for our partners and customers to build solutions that can help them meet their business goals," said Dave Mitchell, IBM Software Group's director of strategy and emerging business. "This relationship with Amazon Web Services provides our customers with a new way to use IBM software and broadens our distribution channels."
One of the most significant aspects of this deal is that IBM is partnering in the cloud space at all. After all, it casts itself as a pioneer and it is not short of its own cutting-edge hardware and technology. But Amazon has come a long way from its origins as an upstart online bookseller just 13 years ago.
It is now a $15 billion retail business and transactional enterprise with a secure distributed computing infrastructure that spans the globe. It has nine software development centres around the world, including sites in Edinburgh, Dublin and Slough, and 23 fulfillment/warehouse operations. And Amazon has a lot of servers; some estimates put the number deployed to run AWS as high as 30,000.
More importantly, it really knows how to trade online and, if nothing else, IBM also knows a good channel when it sees it. Back in the days when Big Blue was preaching the e-business gospel, Amazon, star of so many business seminars on the subject at the turn of the century, was actually doing it. Perhaps another surprising aspect of this deal is that we now barely bat an eyelid at the idea of a book store piping out serious business applications via its own distinctly nebulous network.