IBM was a bit late to the cloud party but has since caught up and is growing quickly. It trades third and fourth place with Google from one market research report to the next, but it is growing quickly.
The company’s first cloud computing effort came in 2008 with a software-as-a-service collaboration suite called LotusLive, which was later was renamed IBM SmartCloud for Social Business. IBM jumpstarted its cloud effort with the 2013 acquisition of SoftLayer, then the world’s largest privately held cloud computing infrastructure provider. It launched a PaaS service called Bluemix, and then added its Watson AI services.
Finally, in late 2017, the company reorganized its offerings into one unit. SoftLayer, Bluemix, and Watson were all moved under one umbrella, and with it IBM Cloud was born. It has more than 170 IBM services, from legacy to modern, including:
- Compute, network, and storage
- Management and security
- Analytics
- Artificial intelligence
- Internet of things (IoT)
- Blockchain
- Integration and migration
And it is backed by IBM Global Services for onsite consulting and assistance.
