Vendor Analysis
published on Sep 08, 2016
Report Overview:
This NelsonHall vendor assessment analyzes IBM's offerings and capabilities in Cloud Infrastructure Migration and Management.
Who is this Report for:
NelsonHall’s Cloud Infrastructure Migration and Management Vendor Assessment for IBM is a comprehensive assessment of IBM’s cloud infrastructure migration and management offerings and capabilities designed for:
- Sourcing managers monitoring the capabilities of existing suppliers of IT services and identifying vendor suitability for cloud infrastructure migration and management services
- Vendor marketing, sales and business managers looking to benchmark themselves against their peers
- Financial analysts and investors specializing in the cloud infrastructure migration and management sector.
Scope of this Report:
The report provides a comprehensive and objective analysis of IBM’s cloud infrastructure migration and management offerings, capabilities, and market and financial strength, including:
- Analysis of the company’s offerings and key service components
- Revenue estimates
- Identification of the company’s strategy, emphasis and new developments
- Analysis of the profile of the company’s customer base including the company’s targeting strategy and examples of current contracts
- Analysis of the company’s strengths, weaknesses, and outlook.
Key Findings & Highlights:
In June 2013, IBM announced the formation of its Cloud Services division to encompass the breadth of its cloud offerings, from SaaS to IaaS. This announcement was made in conjunction with the acquisition of SoftLayer. SoftLayer enabled IBM to expand from its private cloud offering, SmartCloud, into public and hybrid cloud. It provided IBM with 13 data centers dedicated to public cloud, and has become the foundation of IBM’s public cloud offering.
In January 2015, IBM acquired Blue Box to expand its capabilities in hybrid cloud, as well as to further its commitment to utilizing open source technologies. Blue Box’s hybrid platform is based on OpenStack.
IBM’s core cloud offering is its IaaS which is built on SoftLayer. IBM acquired SoftLayer in June 2013, to complement its existing private cloud offerings with SoftLayer’s public cloud offering. Possessing 13 data centers and ~21k customers at the time of purchase, SoftLayer was acquired to both compete against Amazon Web Services and facilitate the expansion of IBM’s hybrid cloud offerings.
Of IBM’s total ~378k headcount, as reported at the end of 2015, NelsonHall estimates that ~5k of these within the Global Technology Services group are associated with delivering cloud services.
IBM has a footprint of 46 cloud datacenters worldwide, including SoftLayer and IBM Cloud Managed Services data centers. It recently announced the opening of its 46th cloud data center, located in Johannesburg, South Africa.