The month of January started out the new year with a flurry of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The complete index of IBM Happenings (by year and month) is here. One of the major focus areas for IBM in 2009 will continue to be related to clouds.
IBM revealed a comprehensive series of new products, services, clients and partnerships for its Blue Cloud initiative — a collaborative approach the company is using to develop and test integrated cloud solutions for businesses. While Google, Apple, Microsoft and others battle it out for email and document cloud services for consumers — much like the browser wars of the 1990’s — IBM is focusing on the enterprise. The company has a wide portfolio of cloud computing offerings for business, such as server capacity on demand, online data protection, Lotus e-mail and collaboration software, testing environments, and high performance computing for research and education. Customers in the pharmaceutical industry, for example, have selected IBM’s Computing on Demand Cloud Services because it provides a highly secure and scalable storage and computing environment. Very large companies often want to build their own clouds and for them IBM offers Infrastructure Consulting Services for Cloud Computing and Infrastructure Strategy and Planning for Cloud Computing. IBM experts conduct workshops to help the customers develop clouds that are based on tried and true (and blue) solutions. I suppose many companies feel that building their clouds with “blue” will mean blue skies ahead for them.

• Complete Index of IBM Happenings (by year and month)