IBM Cloud Portfolio

There are several major cloud computing providers, and IBM is one of them.

IBM is headquartered in Armonk, New York and employs close to 350,000 people worldwide.

IBM’s cloud solutions make up a large part of IBM’s portfolio, with this market bringing the company $27 billion in revenue in 12 months, according to its Q2 2021 earnings report.

See below to learn about IBM and its place in the cloud market: 

IBM Cloud Offerings

IBM offers over 170 different cloud products. Here are some highlights from the company’s cloud portfolio:

• Compute: Allows IBM to help client’s manage their cloud infrastructure and workloads.

• Containers: These allow applications to run quickly and reliably regardless of the computing environment. 

• Developer tools: Helps developers manage their cloud environment, infrastructure, and deployments. 

• Hybrid cloud: IBM hybrid cloud solutions help provide a common platform across cloud, on-premises, and edge environments.

• Integration: Facilitates seamless support for third-party applications, using tools such as APIs. 

• Logging and monitoring: These tools help customers keep track of and analyze activity happenings on their systems. 

• Quantum: Allows users to generate results only possible on quantum computers on their machines through the cloud. 

See more: IBM Partnering with Atos on ‘Digital Transformation’ for Dutch Ministry of Defense

IBM Cloud Partnerships

IBM has a number of strategic partners. These are some of its more high-level partnerships:

• Adobe: Adobe and IBM collaborate through IBM iX, allowing their customers to create better designs

• Apple: IBM and Apple co-developed role-based apps and accelerators that enable more effective functioning of workplaces.

• Cisco: IBM and Cisco have worked together for several years on hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

• Salesforce: IBM and Salesforce teamed up to help businesses use insights and personalization to improve customer experiences.

• SAP: IBM provides hybrid cloud environments for SAP applications that are critical for business intelligence. 

• Workday: IBM and Workday have teamed up to improve employee experiences using various tools, such as AI-powered technology. 

IBM Cloud Use Cases

Here are some examples of customers in several industries using IBM Cloud:

Travel

In order to provide the best customer experience possible, strong digital services are necessary. To facilitate this, American Airlines is using IBM Cloud to host their customer-facing applications. This allowed them to be able to respond to customer needs more quickly, and they were able to launch a dynamic rebooking app that allows customers to easily rebook flights in the event of a forced flight disruption.

Retail

1-800-Flowers.com needed a powerful order management system that integrated fulfillment processes. They chose to go with an IBM commerce on cloud platform, which increased their efficiency, reduced costs, and gave them more room to be able to scale up their operations.

Insurance

Allianz wanted to create a virtual customer assistant that would allow them to manage 80% of their customers’ most frequent requests, while still being in compliance with regulatory requirements. They built Allie, an advanced chatbot, using IBM Cloud and IBM Watson to achieve this. It can understand natural language, allowing customers to solve issues in one to two minutes.

User Reviews of IBM Cloud

Review of IBM Cloud by users at rating sites tend to highlight the sheer power of the platform:

Capterra: 4.7/5

Gartner Peer Insights: 4.3/5

IBM Cloud Industry Recognition

IBM’s customers in various industries have recognized it as a top performer in several categories.

For example, in 2020, IBM Cloud won several awards from Trustradius:

• IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers won in Infrastructure-as-a-Service
• IBM Cloud Object Storage won in Infrastructure-as-a-Service
• IBM Cloud Virtual Servers won in Infrastructure-as-a-Service
• IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service won in Container Management
• IBM Cloud Databases won in both Database-as-a-Service and Relational Databases

IBM Cloud in the Market

In 2021, global cloud infrastructure service revenues are expected to surpass $150 billion, according to Statista.

Currently, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has the lion’s share of the market or 32%. IBM hold 5% of the market, coming up behind Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud.

The strong growth of the cloud market has been facilitated by companies prioritizing the as-a-service model to accelerate digital transformations. The need for new working patterns due to the COVID-19 pandemic has also helped to spur growth in the cloud market.

See more: Public Cloud Computing Providers