12 June 2013 Posted by Paul Burns
Following the June 4th announcement of IBM’s plan to acquire SoftLayer Technologies, Neovise released a perspective report examining the possible effects it could have on the enterprise cloud services landscape and evidence that it could create a disruption within the enterprise cloud services market: IBM to Acquire SoftLayer
If you didn’t have time to read the full report, this blog presents the “Neovise Perspective” section to help you quickly understand why IBM’s acquisition of SoftLayer could dramatically change the future of enterprise cloud services and the way customers make their purchases.
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SoftLayer represents an entirely different type of cloud platform than others in the industry, leading to the possibility that IBM will make a dramatic change to the enterprise cloud service landscape. To understand this possibility, first consider a typical cloud platform as illustrated in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1
As suggested in Figure 1, most public cloud services simply present virtual machines or virtual servers to cloud customers. They do not directly expose the underlying physical servers in the cloud to individual cloud customers, also known as tenants. However, as SoftLayer has proven, many enterprises want more than virtual servers. They want direct access to bare-metal servers in order to squeeze out every drop of performance for databases as well as scale-up applications. They also want these physical and virtual machines to work together in a common cloud environment, with the same programmatic control and automation. This is exactly what SoftLayer delivers.
While automated bare-metal cloud capabilities – as well as other SoftLayer differentiators – have been instrumental in the company’s success, IBM has a chance to take enterprise cloud to a new level. Please see Figure 2 below to better understand the SoftLayer cloud platform.
Figure 2
SoftLayer not only presents bare-metal and virtual machines to customers, it also presents additional clouds to them. In other words, SoftLayer presents a cloud of clouds to its customers. Because of the extremely flexible and versatile nature of the SoftLayer platform, IBM does not have to pick just one type of cloud to deliver to customers. If it chooses, it can deliver an enterprise-class CloudStack cloud and a commodity-class OpenStack cloud, all to a single customer. It can also deliver, simultaneously to the same customer, a highly customized virtual private cloud with whatever infrastructure configuration the customer chooses. IBM can also present bare metal to the many enterprises that want to access servers in that form, while keeping the elastic, pay-as-you-go model typically reserved for virtualization- only clouds.
Neovise believes this approach, if fully embraced by IBM, can represent a game changing disruption in the cloud services market, delivering enterprise customers vastly more flexibility than found in other public cloud offerings. This “meta-platform” also creates new opportunities for IBM to more efficiently run existing outsourced and managed services workloads from its enterprise customers. Neovise also expects IBM to make much of its middleware software portfolio available to run as a service on the SoftLayer platform and accessible to developers and applications regardless of which cloud service they choose from IBM.
Based on research completed by Neovise in 2013, 74% of US-based businesses that use cloud computing are using more than one type of cloud, including public, private and hybrid clouds. Enterprise organizations are even more likely to use multiple clouds and have significantly more stringent requirements for their cloud service providers. They demand high performance, consistent performance, reliability, availability, security, guaranteed service levels and more. Yet they also have applications with conflicting requirements when compared to other applications in their portfolio. Thus they need multiple clouds, each with unique attributes.
This meta-platform approach enabled by SoftLayer creates new opportunities for IBM throughout its hardware, software and services organizations. It also opens the door to cloud computing for many more enterprises that want a single partner who can deliver flexibility and choice across most every aspect of IaaS. With SoftLayer, IBM is now positioned to deliver on the broadest set of enterprise cloud computing requirements across the industry – with multiple clouds on a common platform.
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By now you should understand why IBM’s acquisition of SoftLayer represents a potential step forward for multi-cloud service. We will have to wait until some time after the acquisition to investigate the real-world impact. Until then, tell us your thoughts about what the acquisition could mean. Do you think it could disrupt the enterprise cloud services landscape? Let us know in the comments section below.
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