IBM has introduced advanced cloud services and software designed from the ground up for enterprise clients. New IBM SmartCloud services and capabilities introduce unprecedented choice, security and portability as businesses shift critical activities to the cloud and use it as a platform for business.
IBM plans to support about 200 million users by the end of 2012 as clients shift core applications and processes to the IBM SmartCloud.
Specifically, IBM is launching:
- IBM SmartCloud Application Services – A new platform-as-a-service that will give enterprises the cost and time savings of a cloud environment for a wide range of enterprise applications while maintaining a high level of control and security over deployment and access.
- IBM SmartCloud Foundation – A new portfolio of breakthrough cloud software and hardware that allow enterprises to quickly deploy and control clouds within their own firewalls.
- IBM SmartCloud Ecosystem – New services for IBM partners and independent software vendors (ISVs) to help thousands of small and medium business clients adopt cloud models and manage millions of cloud based transactions by assisting their customers in areas as diverse as banking, communications, healthcare and government to build their own clouds or securely tap into the IBM SmartCloud.
IBM's new version of its public cloud for the enterprise, the IBM SmartCloud, includes a platform as a service (PaaS) specifically designed to meet the needs of enterprise application development, deployment and management on the cloud.
Through this new enterprise PaaS, clients can achieve the benefits of cloud based economics for the deployment of both traditional and new applications, while at the same time maintaining the security, portability and governance critical to maintaining control in the Cloud.
Available in beta in the fourth quarter, IBM SmartCloud Application Services will offer enterprise–grade security, open Java and cross-platform support with no vendor lock-in, and a comprehensive set of application infrastructure and managed services to enable development and deployment of applications to the cloud.
The Application Services will run on IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise and Enterprise+ - the industry’s first enterprise class infrastructure-as-a-platform - specifically designed to run enterprise workloads, at committed business centric service level agreements
IBM SmartCloud Application Services hide the complexity of managing the infrastructure underneath the platform services and simplify the installation, setup, configuration and management of applications, middleware and application tools. This allows enterprises to focus on the business requirements of application itself.
Key capabilities will cover five categories:
* Application Lifecycle – Provide development organizations with access to rapidly activated and team-based development environments and capabilities
* Application Resources – Leverage shared services to reduce the cost and simplify the development, delivery and ongoing administration of cloud applications
* Application Environments – Accelerate and optimize the deployment and management of your applications with pre-defined environments based on common application patterns
* Application Management – Support effective deployment and management of third party applications with optimized deployment and management capabilities tuned to the specific application
* Integration – Integrate your cloud-delivered applications with other applications or resources on-premises or in the cloud
Also, a key enhancement to the SmartCloud includes new services for automating the most common labor intensive tasks associated with managing SAP environments in the cloud. The SmartCloud for SAP Applications taps IBM’s experience in managing over 1.5 million users of SAP to significantly reduce the cost and labor associated with SAP cloning, refreshes and patching.
IBM SmartCloud Foundation
IBM is announcing the SmartCloud Foundation family of private cloud solutions to help companies quickly design and deploy private cloud environments with a new level of control over cloud service delivery and management. As organizations take the next step beyond virtualized data center and begin to expand their cloud environments, they are concerned with managing what has become known as “image sprawl.”
The SmartCloud Foundation portfolio contains these offerings:
IBM SmartCloud Entry solution, delivered by IBM Starter Kit for Cloud, offers the building blocks to create private clouds on virtualized IBM System x and Power Systems hardware.
IBM SmartCloud Provisioning software offers a provisioning engine and image management system to dynamically create or provision virtual machines.
IBM SmartCloud Monitoring applies its industry-leading monitoring expertise to provide greater visibility into the performance of virtual and physical environments: storage, network and server resources. The software contains business- and technical-policy analysis to enable better capacity planning and workload placement. The software’s predictive and historical analytics help IT staff prevent outages of cloud services while reducing operational, licensing and capital costs.
The Latest
In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...
Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...
In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ...
Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...
Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...
Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...
The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...
The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...
In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...
AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.