Given all the excitement around cloud computing, as I travel around meeting with partners I’ve been receiving a lot of questions about the IBM-Amazon partnership to feature our IBM Software on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform.
Quite simply, clients told us that they wanted IBM software available on AWS and we’re delivering it. Customers and developers can now use IBM software on a public elastic cloud environment. Our partnership provides a new “pay-as-you-go” model that provides unprecedented access to development and production instances of many IBM software products.
There are three ways to take advantage of this cloud solution:
1) Development and Test Environments – Those of you building commercially available solutions can access IBM Development Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that include product-level code – with all features and options enabled on a scalable, secure, and cost-effective cloud computing environment. You pay AWS only for your time and the capacity – there is no charge for the IBM software component. Have a proof of concept project? Need to do some training and don’t have idle server capacity? Use any of the Development AMIs in EC2 and only pay for the minimal EC2 charges which start at just $0.10 an hour. Find out more here!
2) Production Environments – All developers and customers can run development and full production instances of IBM software for an hourly price per instance and these can be used for revenue generating activities (unlike the development only environment above). The Production AMIs include the IBM software, the Novell SUSE operating system and the Amazon EC2 service for a single hourly charge per instance. All charges are billed by Amazon Web Services and use of service is governed by Amazon Web Services.
Do you have an event you’re planning? To get the project moving quickly and avoid lengthy procurement cycles and capital expenditures etc, you can get started in a matter of minutes with the WebSphere Portal Server with Lotus Web Content Management AMI. You pay hourly for use – there’s no license, no contract needed. And – you can bring down the site when the event is over without a penalty or additional charges. Details are here!
3) Run your existing IBM Software in the cloud – new licensing guidelines now allow you to run your already-purchased IBM software on Amazon EC2. Do you have licenses sitting idle because you can’t get the hardware in place? Just need more compute infrastructure? You can now move your licenses into the cloud without additional capital expenditures for your customers! Here is how to get started with BYOL….
Let me know if you are using these environments and how it’s working for your business!
Mike Riegel's Blog 