What the IBM, Amazon partnership means to the cloud

This week brought the very interesting news that IBM is making some of its software products (database and middleware, primarily) available on Amazon's EC2. IBM is also offering Amazon Machine Images (AMI) preconfigured with its products, ready to begin running in EC2. The products and AMIs are, for today, only available for development, not production, but IBM and Amazon plan to offer production versions available on a per-hour of use basis in the near future. Furthermore, if you have existing IBM licenses, you can transfer them to EC2 and begin using the Amazon instances for production immediately.

This announcement strikes me as intriguing for a number of reasons:

1. IBM recognizes that Amazon EC2 is becoming an important computing platform and wants to stake a claim to be part of it. If one believes that cloud computing is going to be a fundamental building block for IT in the future, not moving aggressively to be part of it poses the risk of becoming obsolete. It also serves as an endorsement of EC2 by a tried-and-true enterprise vendor, making Amazon seem less risky.

2. It's likely that IBM will make its pricing competitive for people wishing to use its products in EC2. Given that IBM already makes it DB2 available for free for production purposes in smaller machines, it's likely that the pricing on EC2 will be low as well. That offers good opportunities for application builders who prefer a commercial database rather than the open source alternative, MySQL.

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