IBM’s announcement of the Blue Cloud is another step in delivering on demand capabilities around infrastructure, not unlike Amazon’s AWS or Google’s applications. This change in service delivery and managing a highly available infrastructure will radically change what was typically referred to as outsourcing in the data center space to be a new thing – [tag]service-sourcing[/tag].
Do you care where the computing, storage and integration services come from? Probably not, you only care that it is available and scalable. The combined capabilities of hardware, software, services and monitoring from IBM may ultimately represent a tipping point in IT delivery and Management. A cloud deployment of shared services may deliver a new capability for B2B akin to social networking.
Think about it. You consume the same platform as your customers, suppliers, channel partners and other key business partners represents instant interoperability. With the leadership of key cloud providers soon de facto standards will emerge akin to OpenID for B2B.
The cloud platform will soon become platforms for development and provide an ecosystem for mashups and add-on apps similar to [tag]facebook[/tag] applications – in fact they could BE facebook apps. Marketing campaigns will be able to quickly deployed via video, products will become mini and micro payments have the opportunity to level the playing field in the ISV landscape. Under this new paradigm all you need is a compliant cloud app which drives value and scales on demand.
It appears we are quickly approaching a model equal to social media for businesses, are you ready for social integration?