The most logical place for a cloud service to develop inside IBM would have been IBM Global Services. IGS had a sort of proto-cloud set up in 1998-1999 (treated

The most logical place for a cloud service to develop inside IBM would have been IBM Global Services. IGS had a sort of proto-cloud set up in 1998-1999 (treated physical systems as cattle that could be remote wiped, virtualization would have been a logical next step) but sold off the organization building that to AT&T as part of the Global Network sale. I wrote a horrible, hacky, CMS PIPES based gopher/http server for VM some time in 1993 that was used internally for various "non serious" things. A colleague and I designed a native HTTP server for MVS in 1995 and had started coding it when we were more or less reprimanded and told to defer to the then Network Services division which was porting something (I think CERN httpd, they had a bizarre fascination with CERN) to MVS. It just wasn't in anyone's best interest to even experiment with web services on VM or MVS, let alone try to build a business out of it. Cloud happened after I left, but the infrastructure to build or respond to the rise of AWS was never in place, sort of by design.