IBM says OpenStack is the foundation for all of its major cloud platforms

Increases productivity for developers working across clouds

IBM has expanded suite of OpenStack services that allow customers to integrate applications and data across hybrid clouds including public, dedicated and local cloud environments without the fear of vendor lock-in or costly customization.

The new IBM Cloud OpenStack Services enable clients and developers to build applications that deliver security and scalability to meet fluctuating business demands in a public cloud. This includes spikes in usage and big data requirements. Combined with IBM's existing offerings, clients and developers now have access to the broadest set of OpenStack services.

Through the IBM Cloud OpenStack Services, developers and clients will be able to launch applications on local, on-premises installations and now on public clouds hosted on the SoftLayer infrastructure. This can all be done without changing code or configurations. As a result, developers can now build and test an application in a public cloud and use the interoperability of OpenStack to seamlessly deploy that same application and data across hybrid clouds including public, dedicated and local.

"Open technologies are paving the way for broader cloud adoption and enabling companies like Virdata to confidently deploy clouds without the fear of vendor lock-in," said Martin Braem, Virdata Lead for DevOps, Support and Professional Services. "IBM Cloud OpenStack Services gives us the ability to easily move OpenStack workloads across hybrid clouds."

With cloud adoption on the rise, major business complexities are being formed as hundreds of clouds are created without the means to integrate applications and access data located in multiple locations, including their traditional data centers.

To address this, IBM has 500 developers dedicated to working on open cloud projects to bring new cloud innovations to market. Today, IBM is the only cloud provider to combine OpenStack for hybrid clouds including public, dedicated and local.

The new public cloud services that are in beta today bring new capabilities to better serve developers and our clients with the following:

    --  Expanding Access to Public Cloud: By extending its OpenStack services to the public cloud, IBM will provide a complete portfolio of hybrid OpenStack services that span across public, dedicated and local clouds. This will allow companies to deploy and integrate application environments in minutes versus days or weeks traditionally experienced by clients.
    --  Speed and Security: IBM Cloud OpenStack Services will enable clients to quickly deploy an integrated and highly-secure cloud that is built on a strong foundation of security. This will provide companies with the means to monitor their cloud environment and security controls to assist businesses run workloads on trusted hardware.
    --  Network of Data Centers: Developers will be able to quickly set up and scale applications and deliver them to any OpenStack Powered Platform. As part of this, IBM will manage the OpenStack environment and the infrastructure, hosted in IBM's global cloud data centers. This will allow developers and clients to better manage workloads including hosted enterprise applications, analytics, and web and mobile applications.

Today's announcement reinforces IBM's commitment to open cloud services, where these offerings can be consumed though Bluemix and SoftLayer.

Through these IBM OpenStack Services that users can experience here, companies will be able to launch applications on local, on-premises installations, and on public, dedicated and local clouds hosted on the IBM Cloud infrastructure.

"As a top contributor to OpenStack, IBM firmly believes that an open cloud architecture translates into significant cost savings for our clients and will rapidly expand the cloud marketplace," said IBM Vice President of Cloud Architecture and Technology Dr. Angel Diaz. "By delivering a complete portfolio of OpenStack services to the market, we are enabling our clients with what they need to quickly move applications and data across multiple cloud environments without fear of getting locked into a single cloud environment."
Today's announcement builds on IBM's on going leadership within the OpenStack community. In fact, for Kilo, OpenStack's latest release, IBM:
    --  Had hundreds of developers participate in 11,676 code reviews
    --  Implemented 68 blueprints
    --  Fixed 520 bugs for a total of 232,382 lines of code

One of IBM's most important contributions to OpenStack is enabling clients to continue to benefit from the interoperability of OpenStack environments through our leadership in the development of the compliance test tool - RefStack-client.

Extending Partner and Client Value Through OpenStack Services

As IBM extends OpenStack Services, it is working with SAP to deploy enterprise solutions in the cloud more quickly with economies of scale, all while realizing the benefits of an open cloud platform. This is another example of IBM and SAP extending their partnership in the cloud, bringing the enterprise to OpenStack.

IBM total cloud revenue - covering public, private and hybrid engagements - was $7.7 billion over the previous 12 months at the end of March 2015; it grew more than 60 percent in first quarter 2015. IBM's cloud delivered as a service business, a subset of the total, includes IaaS.

For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/cloud.