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Genuine question: Who's actually using IBM Cloud? All I hear is mediocre to terrible reviews. How are they staying in business? Admittedly I could just be hear

Genuine question: Who's actually using IBM Cloud? All I hear is mediocre to terrible reviews. How are they staying in business? Admittedly I could just be hearing a one-sided story. Maybe there's some redeeming feature vis-a-vis AWS or GCP?

zn44 6y ago
Lloyds bank in UK has signed £1B contract with ibm that includes use of IBM cloud I'd imagine it could be popular at banks that are used to working with them for 30 years
- danans 6y ago
  > banks that are used to working with them for 30 years Given that banks were among the earliest commercial customers of computing machinery, it's more like 70 years: https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/bankauto/#:~:text=At%20the%20heart%20of%20these,the%20first%20compatible%20computer%20series https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/bankauto/....
goatinaboat 6y ago
Who's actually using IBM Cloud? Same as Oracle cloud, their users are organisations locked into long-term support contracts, who are offered sweeteners to use their clouds. Which of course only makes them more locked in.
- RulerOf 6y ago
  We finalized the choice to use OCI for an upcoming project because they're the only major public cloud in the country we're deploying to. That said, as a person who's coming from AWS, their demo and documentation have thoroughly piqued my interest. There's a decent amount stuff to like. It's got a slick UI, and the APIs appear to be comprehensive enough to cover our use case.
edejong 6y ago
The most redeeming feature is that normal cloud providers have a zero friction onboarding funnel whereas IBM seems to make you want to meet as many “sales engineers” as possible.
- ALurchyBeast 6y ago
  IBM tries to capture the 1% of the market that accounts for 99% of the revenue. You or I spinning up a micro instance is not who IBM wants.
mathgorges 6y ago
I'd imagine shops that are tightly coupled to the z/OS stack would find IBM cloud attractive.
curiousllama 6y ago
IBM had a successful hosting business before cloud (I.e. you could outsource your data center to them). AFAIK, that just rebranded that to “cloud” when AWS came along, despite lacking all the things that made it a cloud rather than a regular data center. The people who use IBM cloud are the same people who used them for data centers in the past.
ivalm 6y ago
I work for a large company that uses IBM as part of our “hybrid cloud.” I am pretty sure we have an at least 9 digit contract with them. We have a private cloud by IBM (click2cloud) and IBM Bluemix. Honestly they are both bad. We also have azure and that’s night and day. But then again we even have oracle cloud, which I guess just means we like to step on mines in a minefield. I think part of why we use IBM cloud services is we also use their consulting heavily. Everything runs on rhel and is supported by ibm.
- quacked 6y ago
  I work for a large organization that uses IBM-maintained tools, and they're awful. Is anything IBM does good?
  - johnward 6y ago
    Their legal team is pretty good?
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    They supported Linux early, at a time when it was vulnerable.
  - kbrwn 6y ago
    SQL
  - kubanczyk 6y ago
    AIX and POWER
actuator 6y ago
I used to think the same about Azure. Most of the experience I have heard about it is not positive, yet it is comfortably number 2. I think the overall pie is huge enough. So you can have advantages in niches in product or good customer relationships and still do well. Though, I haven't personally needed a compelling feature which AWS or GCP was missing, so I have never had to use any other product for work.
- jariel 6y ago
  MS is not IBM though. Azure is a 'best effort' attempt at a seriously important strategic vertical by a very smart company with deep pockets. MS would throw zillions of dollars and blood at Azure to make it work. MS has very deep enterprise relationships, way more so than Amazon or Google and in the long run, that may be the advantage. A lot of 'fancy services' that we see are not 'the thing' that corps want: they want to spin up servers, basic networking and security, do things at scale. That's the bread and butter and Azure can surely provide that. Being on the buying side of some of these things, even 100% aware that 'other offers may be better' it's extremely hard to fend off the professionalism of a well managed sales effort. It's even rational: entities that are so operationally effective at managing the relationship 'surely must have tech that works'. And it's a 'safe choice'. I always assumed Azure would carve something out, IBM, not so much. Oracle, somewhere in between.
  - actuator 6y ago
    I am not dismissing Azure. Outside of AWS or GCP, the only IaaS platform I can think of using is Azure. MS certainly has the competency to run a good competitor alongside AWS and GCP in the long run. I was just pointing out how easily we can misjudge things based on our echo chambers. > MS has very deep enterprise relationships, way more so than Amazon or Google and in the long run, that may be the advantage. I think this is something even their competitors realize. That's why the current and previous heads of Google Cloud were from enterprise software companies, Oracle and VmWare.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
einpoklum 6y ago
I've never used cloud services. But I do know IBM has some interesting hardware available in the cloud servers. The Power architecture allows, for example, "1st-class citizen" status to GPUs w.r.t. main memory access: They can access main memory using NVlink. NVIDIA has therefore had some on-mainboard, non-card GPUs available mostly (solely?) in IBM power machines. Obviously this is not enough for an entire cloud business but they're not just an "also-ran" cloud offering.
mhh__ 6y ago
If it's like some areas of IBMs business it could be a We'll take your money but we don't actually care either way situation (e.g. try and buy a POWER machine)
toast0 6y ago
I worked at a company that used Softlayer before we were acquired and before Softlayer was acquired by IBM. We moved off to the acquirer datacenter, because that's what you do. Softlayer was a very nice place to get bare metal hosting. You get a whole machine to do whatever on, they provide a solid network, and replace components when they fail (and you open a ticket). We didn't use any ancillary services for the most part, we had been using their included DNS, but switched off because update delays were getting too large and we didn't like the support response on that; we used their loadbalancers for one service for a few months, but it had worse uptime than the hosts behind it. I have heard their other ancillerary services were (are?) bad too. From what I saw, support in general was getting worse, but that could have been because of IBM takeover or because we were going from a top ten customer to an average customer. I would consider them an option in cases where you want to run all the services you consume, but you don't want to run your own datacenters. They had a decent worldwide footprint, and post-IBM they got a lot more datacenters outside the US; that could be a big deal, because sometimes you just need a couple machines in another continent, and it's easier if you already are on board. Also, at least when we were there, private network traffic was free, worldwide, which is nice to manage replication for disasters. If you're more cloudy though, and make use of integrated services, and small instance types with per minute billing, I wouldn't consider it. Also, they had that global routing issue earlier this year, which would have been hard (impossible?) to mitigate as a single vendor customer.
microtherion 6y ago
I absolutely can believe IBM being successful as a cloud provider. I have considerably more doubt about them as an AI player. And their efforts to brand themselves as a blockchain player don't even seem to have merited a mention. Have they given up on that already?
sachinag 6y ago
Techmeme runs on IBM Cloud.

zn44 6y ago

Lloyds bank in UK has signed £1B contract with ibm that includes use of IBM cloud I'd imagine it could be popular at banks that are used to working with them for 30 years

danans 6y ago
> banks that are used to working with them for 30 years Given that banks were among the earliest commercial customers of computing machinery, it's more like 70 years: https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/bankauto/#:~:text=At%20the%20heart%20of%20these,the%20first%20compatible%20computer%20series https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/bankauto/....

goatinaboat 6y ago

Who's actually using IBM Cloud? Same as Oracle cloud, their users are organisations locked into long-term support contracts, who are offered sweeteners to use their clouds. Which of course only makes them more locked in.

RulerOf 6y ago
We finalized the choice to use OCI for an upcoming project because they're the only major public cloud in the country we're deploying to. That said, as a person who's coming from AWS, their demo and documentation have thoroughly piqued my interest. There's a decent amount stuff to like. It's got a slick UI, and the APIs appear to be comprehensive enough to cover our use case.

edejong 6y ago

The most redeeming feature is that normal cloud providers have a zero friction onboarding funnel whereas IBM seems to make you want to meet as many “sales engineers” as possible.

ALurchyBeast 6y ago
IBM tries to capture the 1% of the market that accounts for 99% of the revenue. You or I spinning up a micro instance is not who IBM wants.

mathgorges 6y ago

I'd imagine shops that are tightly coupled to the z/OS stack would find IBM cloud attractive.

curiousllama 6y ago

IBM had a successful hosting business before cloud (I.e. you could outsource your data center to them). AFAIK, that just rebranded that to “cloud” when AWS came along, despite lacking all the things that made it a cloud rather than a regular data center. The people who use IBM cloud are the same people who used them for data centers in the past.

ivalm 6y ago

I work for a large company that uses IBM as part of our “hybrid cloud.” I am pretty sure we have an at least 9 digit contract with them. We have a private cloud by IBM (click2cloud) and IBM Bluemix. Honestly they are both bad. We also have azure and that’s night and day. But then again we even have oracle cloud, which I guess just means we like to step on mines in a minefield. I think part of why we use IBM cloud services is we also use their consulting heavily. Everything runs on rhel and is supported by ibm.

quacked 6y ago
I work for a large organization that uses IBM-maintained tools, and they're awful. Is anything IBM does good?
- johnward 6y ago
  Their legal team is pretty good?
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  They supported Linux early, at a time when it was vulnerable.
- kbrwn 6y ago
  SQL
- kubanczyk 6y ago
  AIX and POWER

actuator 6y ago

I used to think the same about Azure. Most of the experience I have heard about it is not positive, yet it is comfortably number 2. I think the overall pie is huge enough. So you can have advantages in niches in product or good customer relationships and still do well. Though, I haven't personally needed a compelling feature which AWS or GCP was missing, so I have never had to use any other product for work.

jariel 6y ago
MS is not IBM though. Azure is a 'best effort' attempt at a seriously important strategic vertical by a very smart company with deep pockets. MS would throw zillions of dollars and blood at Azure to make it work. MS has very deep enterprise relationships, way more so than Amazon or Google and in the long run, that may be the advantage. A lot of 'fancy services' that we see are not 'the thing' that corps want: they want to spin up servers, basic networking and security, do things at scale. That's the bread and butter and Azure can surely provide that. Being on the buying side of some of these things, even 100% aware that 'other offers may be better' it's extremely hard to fend off the professionalism of a well managed sales effort. It's even rational: entities that are so operationally effective at managing the relationship 'surely must have tech that works'. And it's a 'safe choice'. I always assumed Azure would carve something out, IBM, not so much. Oracle, somewhere in between.
- actuator 6y ago
  I am not dismissing Azure. Outside of AWS or GCP, the only IaaS platform I can think of using is Azure. MS certainly has the competency to run a good competitor alongside AWS and GCP in the long run. I was just pointing out how easily we can misjudge things based on our echo chambers. > MS has very deep enterprise relationships, way more so than Amazon or Google and in the long run, that may be the advantage. I think this is something even their competitors realize. That's why the current and previous heads of Google Cloud were from enterprise software companies, Oracle and VmWare.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago

einpoklum 6y ago

I've never used cloud services. But I do know IBM has some interesting hardware available in the cloud servers. The Power architecture allows, for example, "1st-class citizen" status to GPUs w.r.t. main memory access: They can access main memory using NVlink. NVIDIA has therefore had some on-mainboard, non-card GPUs available mostly (solely?) in IBM power machines. Obviously this is not enough for an entire cloud business but they're not just an "also-ran" cloud offering.

mhh__ 6y ago

If it's like some areas of IBMs business it could be a We'll take your money but we don't actually care either way situation (e.g. try and buy a POWER machine)

toast0 6y ago

I worked at a company that used Softlayer before we were acquired and before Softlayer was acquired by IBM. We moved off to the acquirer datacenter, because that's what you do. Softlayer was a very nice place to get bare metal hosting. You get a whole machine to do whatever on, they provide a solid network, and replace components when they fail (and you open a ticket). We didn't use any ancillary services for the most part, we had been using their included DNS, but switched off because update delays were getting too large and we didn't like the support response on that; we used their loadbalancers for one service for a few months, but it had worse uptime than the hosts behind it. I have heard their other ancillerary services were (are?) bad too. From what I saw, support in general was getting worse, but that could have been because of IBM takeover or because we were going from a top ten customer to an average customer. I would consider them an option in cases where you want to run all the services you consume, but you don't want to run your own datacenters. They had a decent worldwide footprint, and post-IBM they got a lot more datacenters outside the US; that could be a big deal, because sometimes you just need a couple machines in another continent, and it's easier if you already are on board. Also, at least when we were there, private network traffic was free, worldwide, which is nice to manage replication for disasters. If you're more cloudy though, and make use of integrated services, and small instance types with per minute billing, I wouldn't consider it. Also, they had that global routing issue earlier this year, which would have been hard (impossible?) to mitigate as a single vendor customer.

microtherion 6y ago

I absolutely can believe IBM being successful as a cloud provider. I have considerably more doubt about them as an AI player. And their efforts to brand themselves as a blockchain player don't even seem to have merited a mention. Have they given up on that already?

sachinag 6y ago

Techmeme runs on IBM Cloud.