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Comment by iaw | Hacker News Reader

Would a good analogy be the IBM of cloud services?

Is IBM even relevant anymore? Amazon is the leader here by a huge margin, Azure is a distant second, and the rest don't even register on the radar.

You and <cool SV startup> don't register that on the radar. But the random Fortune 500 big corp is pouring money into "Enterprise Clouds" like Oracle, IBM and SAP with embedded sales, consulting and support.

I work for one of those three. The amount of $1-$10 million contracts that come through for "enterprise cloud" software and services is amazing. For the division I work in, our usage is increasing upwards of 10% month over month. Maybe even faster, actually.

IBM has SoftLayer, which is fairly decent.

Oracles/SAP are really not comparable.

SoftLayer is nice, but the enterprise giants are looking to host your ERM or HR capability and charge you $x million a year for it.

Yes. SAP is doing SaaS for their entreprise-suite software.

That's why I am saying it's not comparable to IaaS offerings from AWS/Azure/Google. It's a different business.

You misinterpreted iaw's response. Its an analogy that Azure is IBM for the cloud.

Thank you.

I assumed more people would know the history of IBM and how it maintained relevance through consulting work around it's enterprise products when it couldn't keep up with the PC market.

Know your audience. Can you extend the analogy to the other players?

"The jQuery of cloud computing"

They are extremely relevant. They are one of the largest tech consulting firms in the world, which makes pushing their products (like enterprise cloud) on businesses a lot easier.

IBM's blueBiz has a generous free plan that is adequate for running a couple web apps. Haven;t used them in a while, but a good platform, especially if your side projects fit in the free plan.

IBM's cloud services are exactly competing with Azure in enterprise cloud

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