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They May Have Lost The CIA, But IBM Can Still Pick Up Some Lucrative Cloud Contracts

This article is more than 9 years old.

The big news in terms of customer stories for IBM's Softlayer cloud over the past year has been the on-again, off-again (and now, seemingly, off forever) battle with AWS over the CIA private cloud contract. Despite much spin, and plenty of litigation, it seems that deal is firmly ensconced with AWS now.

But that's not to say that IBM isn't picking up some tasty cloud contracts - in recent weeks there have been some high profile customer wins:

For me it's interesting to see these deals in light of my attendance at the AWS Summit in Sydney last week (disclosure - AWS covered my travel and expenses to attend the event). I was pretty amazed at the sheer volume of people who attended the summit, and the high-profile nature of some of the companies - NAB Bank and Suncorp are but two examples of large enterprises that have seemingly completely gotten over their cloud antipathy and are going "all in" on the cloud.

In conversations with AWS customers at the event, I was similarly surprised at just how polarized these customers are - the concept of multi cloud, getting cloud infrastructure from multiple vendors, isn't something that resonates with them. If a workload is suitable for the public cloud - seemingly the decision is already made, AWS it is.

It would be easy to look at this and make a knee jerk comment about AWS having won the war. Indeed at the event, AWS' head, Werner Vogels, was quick to crow over Gartner's cloud infrastructure Magic Quadrant which puts AWS so far in front of the competition that seemingly the race has already been won before it even started.

I don't believe, however, that this is the case. Enterprises are no less likely to commit to only one public cloud provider as they are to decide that every employee gets the same laptop. Enterprise needs are complex and varied and the infrastructural choices will vary depending on these complexities.

The IaaS market is in no way a zero sum game - both IBM and Microsoft in particular have shown they can make the painful moves and decisions to maintain relevance in a cloudy world. Google has more work to do but it too has the ability to be a player in this market.

Don't forget that of these vendors - Microsoft and IBM have an enterprise pedigree - we are yet to see how either Google or AWS will perform as a real enterprise technology vendor.

The future is going to be even more complex than the present and there is room for all of these vendors to have a role to play going forwards - true AWS has an incredible lead, but that is likely to spur the others into action rather than to demoralize them. These IBM customers are testimony to th fact that not every question has an answer that can be delivered by AWS.