Tag Archives: Smart Cloud

IBM Software Now All Priced For the Cloud!

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Today at our Impact event in Las Vegas, we’re excited to announce two new great opportunities for partners to take advantage of as they capitlize on the demand for cloud computing solutions.

To help start-up companies and IBM Business Partners more easily build their own cloud applications and infrastructures with IBM technology, today we announced:

  1. New monthly rental pricing of IBM software for any ISV delivering their Software as a Service application with IBM middleware.  This allows ISVs to deliver their SaaS applications with IBM software and scale up or down the software licenses needed monthly, complementing the flexible manner these ISVs bill clients for their SaaS applications.
  2. New financing programs specifically designed for IBM Business Partners building cloud computing technical environments.  With low cost to 0% financing and deferred payments up to 6 months on IBM technology and services, the company will offer qualifying partners the opportunity to avoid large up-front costs as they start their cloud businesses.

One of the coolest features of the new pricing models is that you can commit total usage across a range of 20 key products and true up at the end of each month in total.  This is one of the key areas our partners told us would really help – so we can all get out of trying to forecast usage at each product area and instead focus on driving new business.

You can get all the details at ibm.com/cloud.   Full press release here.

The new offerings come on the heels of IBM’s newly announced enterprise cloud service delivery platform, the IBM SmartCloud, announced last week!  And of course they build on the IBM Cloud Computing Specialty program for partners and the new Cloud Computing Community we announced in late February which will enable IBM to develop the IT industry’s broadest ecosystem of companies providing a wide range of cloud computing services and technologies.
And in case anyone wonders if we are embracing Cloud – just a reminder that our recent 2011 Investor meeting, we laid out the company’s 2015 roadmap on the continued transformation of IBM with focus on higher value capabilities.  Our CFO, Mark Loughridge stated that IBM projects $7 billion in Cloud  revenue by 2015.

Yup – $7 billion.

Special thanks to our IBM Business Partners TOTVS, GROUP Solutions Group, CloudOne, Availity, along with many other early  adopters of our pilot pricing program, for helping us refine the monthly software rental pricing models.