Blue cloud thinking

IBM has unveiled a whole bunch of new products, services, clients and partnerships for its year-old Blue Cloud initiative, which is the collective name of IBM's cloud computing offering.

Among the announcements are five new cloud computing customers, an Infrastructure Strategy and Planning for Cloud Computing service for customers and The IBM Design and Implementation for Cloud Test Environments, which allows clients to build a cloud platform within their own IT environments to test new applications.

There was also the revelation of a partnership with Juniper networks to "demonstrate how a hybrid cloud could allow enterprises to seamlessly extend their private clouds to remote servers in a secure public cloud."

"Enterprise clients need economically compelling solutions that help them run their businesses in smarter ways, while never taking their eyes off of security, resiliency and compliance," said Erich Clementi, GM of enterprise initiatives at IBM.

"Cloud computing leverages many of IBM's core strengths - such as open standards, service management, scalable systems and excellence in data center operations - and gives clients the opportunity to leverage cloud computing's considerable cost advantages."

IBM revealed that analyst firm IDC has predicted that cloud computing services will represent a $42 billion market by 2012. IBM's cloud computing offering can be seen here.

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