IBM Launches Dev & Test Service for the Cloud

Last week we got another hint that CloudBees is moving in the right direction when IBM announced their Cloud offering for Development and Testing.

I was raised in an IBM family, read Buck Rogers book when I was younger, my Father feared for me when I did not go to work for IBM, and heard the “You never get fired for going with IBM” line more than a few times. While some make fun of IBM, I do have an inbred healthy respect for them. They have superlative marketing and well-thought-out positioning. They have a huge installed base that mirrors the market, although perhaps a bit on the laggard side so their customers feel “safe”.

This announcement reflects all of that. It has compelling benefits for the customer:
“Traditional development and testing environments pose several challenges: high labor and capital costs, long development cycles and greater risk for configuration errors. Developers are now finding ways to meet these challenges using cloud computing.”

It includes a clear high level statement of the service and further hits the benefits:
“IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud is designed to provide you with rapid access to a security-rich, cloud-based enterprise-class development and test environment. Our standardized development and test environment on the IBM Cloud can help you realize faster application deployment with reduced capital and operational costs. You have virtually no infrastructure to maintain and benefit from pay-as-you-go pricing for your development and testing resources. And, you can set up more accurate test environments in minutes versus weeks using standardized configurations.”

Of course, my heart today lies more with the people that chose something other than IBM and did not get fired. This offering is limited to Rational users, and only runs on IBM’s more “Hosted” than Amazon-ish “Cloud” service where users have to rent or pre-book machines.

Sacha talks about how he used to view the Cloud as a set of machines and now he views it from the other side – as a set of services where users do not have to worry about machines and provisioning. Stuff just runs and scales and is secure. IBM views it from the machine side still. It will be interesting to see when they start to think about it from the other side…

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