James Governor's Monkchips

Opinonated Infrastructure: The Cloud and IBM’s Billion Dollar Linux Baby

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IBM’s first wave Linux investments were great for establishing market penetration for on premise enterprise application deployment, but as the cloud, and a culture focused on building rather than buying packaged apps takes over, Ubuntu is putting pressure on Red Hat and SuSE as the deployment environment of choice. IBM needs to invest to ensure developer-friendly distros run on its POWER microprocessor architecture.

On prem is no longer the lock it was. IBM needs to succeed in the cloud in order to realise its Big Data ambitions, and obviously it needs to succeed in the cloud for existential reasons.

Stephen summarised many of the challenges facing first generation Linux businesses in this great post Roll Your Own Hardware and The Disruption of the Enterprise Server Market

Of course IBM isn’t the only one investing in cloud. As I argue in the video below, with BONUS UNICORNS and SITAR MUSIC, these days all tech investments are cloud investments, even the ones that don’t look like it at first glance.

IBM PureSystems sponsors this Opinionated Infrastructure video series. We also record regular Google Hangouts with a range of experts on issues du jour. You should check out the show this Wednesday – we’re talking about the role of standards (and distros!) in the cloud. You should watch the show on YouTube Live! this Wednesday, October 16th at 12pm EDT (5 pm UK time). We have Luke Kanies, founder of PuppetLabs on the show, and Angel Diaz, IBM’s man on the west coast, driving IBM efforts around technologies such as OpenStack and CloudFoundry.

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