IT market researchers Gartner recommend that corporations view IBM’s “Blue Cloud” portfolio as a first step towards cloud computing but as no more.

Corporations considering setting up their own cloud computing architecture with some help from IBM’s cloud computing architecture should consider Blue Cloud, is the market researchers advice. Companies simply looking to use cloud computing as a service are not part of the target group, according to Gartner. As IBM does not offer Blue Cloud as an external infrastructure solution, the Connecticut-based market researches do not actually count Blue Cloud as a cloud computing offer in their analysis, but this does not mean that IBM will be offering products based on Blue Cloud technology in future.

The market researchers view of the Blue Cloud development timeline is that IBM will not be in a position to make tangible offers until the second half of 2008 at the earliest. As of mid-2009, Gartner assumes that IBM will offer new hardware platforms, software and services all optimized for cloud computing. This would mean that IBM could offer applications in the vein of SaaS, or empower customers to offer them. Blue cloud is unlikely not stabilize with additional offers, more vendors and with respect to technology standards before 2010, says Garnter.

According to an announcement by IBM, IBM’s Blaue Wolke comprises Open Source software and is based on open standards (as we reported). The software helps to distribute the workload optimally over multiple servers. IBM is looking to provide an infrastructure for a company’s IT -System to allow multiple data centers to be organizeds as a single, globally accessible resource, in a similar way to the Internet.

IT market researchers Gartner recommend that corporations view IBM’s “Blue Cloud” portfolio as a first step towards cloud computing but as no more.