IBM and Microsoft have joined forces to provide their respective enterprise software on Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud. As adoption of hybrid cloud computing accelerates, this relationship would give clients, partners and developers more choice in their cloud hosting environments, helping them drive new business opportunities, spur innovation and reduce costs.
“Together we are creating new opportunities to drive innovation in hybrid cloud,” said Robert LeBlanc, Senior Vice President, Software and Cloud Solutions Group, IBM. “This agreement reinforces IBM‘s strategy in providing open cloud technology for the enterprise. Clients will now gain unprecedented access to IBM’s leading middleware and will have an even greater level of choice over the tools that they use to build and deploy their cloud environments.”
Specifically, the newly announced relationship would provide the following client benefits:
- IBM and Microsoft will make key IBM middleware such as WebSphere Liberty, MQ, and DB2 available on Microsoft Azure with pay-per-use pricing options.
- Windows Server and SQL Server will be offered on IBM Cloud.
- IBM and Microsoft are working together to deliver a Microsoft .NET runtime for IBM’s Bluemix cloud development platform.
- To support hybrid cloud deployments, IBM will expand support of its software running on Windows Server Hyper-V, and the companies plan to make IBM Pure Application Service available on both Microsoft Azure and IBM SoftLayer for automated deployment, configuration and license management in a hybrid cloud environment.
The companies will enable customers to bring their own software licenses to the IBM and Microsoft clouds, helping customers avoid extra cost.
“Microsoft is committed to helping enterprise customers realize the tremendous benefits of cloud computing across their own systems, partner clouds and Microsoft Azure,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft. “With this agreement more customers will be able to take advantage of the hyper-scale, enterprise performance and hybrid capabilities of Azure.”
