eWeek recently conducted an interview with Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive for Software & Systems at IBM, and they discussed cloud computing, IBM’s BlueMix PaaS and other topics. Somewhat surprisingly, Mills said IBM cloud development platform was meant to compete with Microsoft’s cloud computing offerings, not Amazon’s. “When we came up with BlueMix I wasn’t staring at AWS, I was staring at Azure,” he said. “. . . I?m paying much more attention to Azure.”
Mills added:
“Enterprises care a lot about hybrid. They want to integrate front end to back end ? ‘I want to put this out in the cloud, but I want to move data back and forth.’ And delivering those integration mechanisms and APIs is going to be the key differentiator for BlueMix. Allowing customers to create their own private workspaces where they have their components and things they want to put into the environment, again, is something I think we can excel in. Because we do understand the enterprise. We know what they?re dealing with in terms of their own internal componentization and creating their own API structures and so on. So I think there are a lot of dimensions that we can leverage with this offering to go beyond anything anybody else has out there.”
