IBM announced its partnership with Amazon Web Services this week. Six IBM products (see the list below) will be available in the Amazon cloud in the near future.
- IBM DB2
- Informix Dynamic Server
- WebSphere Portal
- Lotus Web Content Management
- WebSphere sMash
- Novell’s SUSE Linux operating system
The pricing for usage is billed hourly and paid to Amazon; however, the billing is based on the hourly usage of IBM software, Novell operating system and EC2 Service. Though there are plans to offer premium support, the pricing for support is not yet disclosed.
This is an interesting announcement and makes it easy for the enterprise to adopt the AWS cloud if their platform is based on IBM products. The cost of using IBM products might be higher than an open source powered service in Amazon cloud. However, it will be interesting to compare the cost models of these services in AWS and IBM Blue cloud .