IBM South Africa recently announced a new range of cloud solutions to enable business users to take advantage of ‘pay only for what you use’ computing.

Werner Lindemann, vice president of Global Technology Services for IBM Sub-Saharan Africa, explained that an increasing numbers of organisations are seeking to leverage the scale and flexibility of the public cloud, but are concerned about losing control of resources outside of their four walls. This, he elaborated, is causing organisations to embrace a ‘hybrid’ or shared services cloud model, where they can more easily manage some resources in-house, while also using other applications externally as a service.

With this in mind, Linderman continued that IBM’s next-generation cloud service delivery platform is now available to South African businesses on an utility model. He elaborated that the IBM SmartCloud architecture and platform for private, public and hybrid clouds for enterprise “delivers a robust set of services including computing, storage, mail and backup”. IBM’s newly expanded SmartCloud  includes:

• IBM SmartCloud Enterprise – aimed at providing businesses with rapid access to security-rich, enterprise-class virtual server environments, that is well suited for development and test activities and other dynamic workloads.
• IBM SmartCloud Mailbox - designed specifically to provide email as a service for businesses seeking to reduce their investment in infrastructure and licences by paying only for mailboxes required on either Lotus Domino or Microsoft Exchange. This will be further expanded to a full-range SmartCloud Desktop in the future.
• IBM SmartCloud Managed Backup – Managed Backup services provide end-to-end, cloud-based managed services to help businesses protect their business data, regardless of where it's stored. It further enables security-rich protection of critical data on-site or off-site for increased availability, while reducing the total cost of ownership involved in backing up data.
• IBM SmartCloud Archive – specifically designed to meet stringent privacy and regulatory compliance, from advanced indexing, search and retrieval, to eDiscovery capabilities. Additionally, it is intended to help businesses deal with structured and unstructured content and control rising data storage costs; while improving the availability of critical business content.

Werner Lindemann, vice president of Global Technology Services for IBM Sub-Saharan Africa

At the launch of the new services, Mark Walker, director for Insights and Vertical Industries at the IDC Middle East, Africa and Turkey, commented that “Cloud Computing is not just a new package to the concept of centralised computing, it’s the beginning of utility computing offering both tactical and strategic business benefits.”
"As cloud computing models emerging as a strategic means to quickly unlock business value from data sources, IBM is making offerings enterprise-ready with the best monitoring, governance and security tools available," concluded Lindemann.

In related news search giant Google recently purchased another 1023 patents from IBM.