IBM to Use Open Standards for Its Cloud Services

IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced Monday that its cloud services and software will be based on an open cloud architecture.

This move, says IBM, will ensure innovation in cloud computing is not hampered by locking businesses into proprietary islands of unsecured and difficult-to-manage offerings.

Without industry-wide open standards for cloud computing, businesses will not be able to fully take advantage of the opportunities associated with interconnected data, such as mobile computing and big data, suggests IBM.

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As the first step, the company has unveiled a new cloud offering based on open cloud standards, including OpenStack to simplify enterprise-grade cloud. Businesses can have a core set of open source-based technologies to build enterprise-class cloud services that can be ported across hybrid cloud environments.

“History has shown that standards and open source are hugely beneficial to end customers and are a major catalyst for innovation,” said Robert LeBlanc, IBM senior vice president of software.

Based on customer-driven requirements, the new software, called IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator, aims to give clients greater flexibility by removing the need to develop specific interfaces for different cloud services.

With the new software, IBM says, companies can quickly combine and deploy various cloud services onto the cloud infrastructure by lining up the compute, storage and network resources with an easy-to-use graphical interface.

IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator is now available through a beta program and is expected to be generally available later this year.