IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a new agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc., to deliver IBM's market leading software to clients and developers. The new "pay-as-you-go" model provides clients with access to development and production instances of IBM DB2, Informix Dynamic Server, WebSphere Portal, Lotus Web Content Management, WebSphere sMash and Novell's SUSE Linux operating system software in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) environment, providing a comprehensive portfolio of products available on AWS.
Businesses today are looking for ways to quickly build, deploy and take advantage of the flexibility that cloud computing environments can bring. This is challenging for organizations that are constrained by limited resources, technical skills and capital, as they look to their IT infrastructure to help them gain a competitive advantage. IBM and Amazon Web Services are helping to address these challenges by making it easier for software developers to build solutions based on open standards and backed up by the necessary technical resources to help simplify the process.
Effective immediately, IBM is making available new Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) at no charge for development and test purposes, enabling software developers to quickly build pre-production applications based on IBM software within Amazon EC2. The new portfolio will over time extend to include Service Management capabilities from IBM Tivoli software for Amazon EC2 to help clients better control and automate their dynamic infrastructures in the cloud.
The IBM software images for full production running in Amazon EC2 will be launched in beta in the coming months, with pricing to be announced. All developers and customers will have the operational capability to run development and production instances of IBM software for an hourly price per instance.
Additionally, customers will also be able to run their already-purchased IBM software on Amazon EC2.
"IBM is offering yet another way for our partners and customers to build solutions that can help them meet their business goals," said Dave Mitchell, Director of Strategy and Emerging Business, IBM Software Group. "This relationship with Amazon Web Services provides our customers with a new way to use IBM software and broadens our distribution channels."
We are pleased to be working with IBM to extend this new model for building and deploying applications to companies of all sizes," said Terry Wise, Director of Business Development for Amazon Web Services. "Extending IBM software to the cloud via Amazon EC2 will help even more businesses take advantage of the benefits of the reliable, scalable and cost efficient infrastructure in the cloud."
The new development AMIs can be accessed by visiting the new IBM Cloud Space on developerWorks or the IBM section of the Featured Partners page .