IBM announced Tuesday its latest Azure services which supports developers and testers with an eye on providing public cloud services.   The latest IBM cloud services make available its Web Sphere suite of applications as well as well as its Informix and DB2 databases.    IBM is extending its products and services to strengthen its position against competition from Google, Amazon and Microsoft.   "IBM has been talking a good cloud game for the last year or so," blogged Forrester Research analyst James Staten. "But its public cloud efforts, outside of application hosting have been a bit of wait and see. Well, the company is clearly getting its act together in the public cloud space with today’s announcement."    As part of the announcement, IBM selected Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) over VMware’s hypervisor.    Scott Crenshaw VP and GM of Red Hat’s cloud business stated “It’s a big milestone”.   

IBM highlighted the fact that 50% of a typical IT infrastructure in an organization is used during the development and testing cycle, meanwhile as much as 90% of its capacity remains idle at any point in time.    "Certainly any IaaS [infrastructure as a service] can be used for test and development purposes so IBM isn’t breaking new ground here," stated Forrester's Staten.   IBM announced its release of Rational Software Delivery Services for Cloud Computing v1.0, which bundles components from IBM’s Rational development and testing suite.  Pricing has not yet been announced.

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http://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2010/03/17/ibm-launches-public-cloud-service.aspx