IBM has announced a new agreement with Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, to deliver IBM's software to clients and developers.  The new "pay-as-you-go" model provides clients with access to development and production instances of IBM DB2, Informix Dynamic Server, WebSphere Portal, Lotus Web Content Management, WebSphere sMash and Novell's SUSE Linux operating system software in the Amazon EC2 environment.

Effective immediately, IBM is making available new Amazon Machine Images at no charge for development and test purposes, enabling software developers to quickly build pre-production applications based on IBM software within Amazon EC2. The new portfolio will over time extend to include Service Management capabilities from IBM Tivoli software for Amazon EC2 to help clients better control and automate their dynamic infrastructures in the cloud.

The IBM software images for full production running in Amazon EC2 will be launched in beta in the coming months, with pricing to be announced. All developers and customers will have the operational capability to run development and production instances of IBM software for an hourly price per instance.

Additionally, customers will also be able to run their already-purchased IBM software on Amazon EC2.

The new development AMIs can be accessed by visiting the new IBM Cloud Space on developerWorks at www.ibm.com/developerworks/spaces/cloud or the IBM section of the Featured Partners page at http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/featured-partners/.