PaaS on Ulitzer

Stacey Higgenbottom over at the GigaOM blogs had a chat with IBM's chief cloud wrangler Erich Clementi and came away saying that IBM's going to built a general-purpose WebSphere platform-as-a-service offering along the lines of Microsoft's Azure and Rackspace's Mosso - and to a lesser extent Google's App Engine and Salesforce's Force.com - not to mention whatever VMware will build now that it's buying SpringSource.

"We have the largest base of middleware in the industry," he told her, "and as computing moves to a cloud delivery model we are going to support that move. Look at our CloudBurst services and WebSphere; we are clearly going to have our software stacks as a platform."

Clementi called Amazon "a street corner" for computer cycles.

IBM, by contrast, aims to be for the carriage trade complete with SAS 70 certification and an audit trail - "not let an employee swipe a credit card and have everyone order machinery."