Worked for IBM Cloud right after they started blue-washing Softlayer. Besides what the author described in the article, there were two IBM Clouds: one for infr

Worked for IBM Cloud right after they started blue-washing Softlayer. Besides what the author described in the article, there were two IBM Clouds: one for infrastructure (aka Softlayer) and another for PaaS/SaaS (aka IBM Software group's Bluemix) with totally different technologies (although Bluemix Public ran on top of Softlayer) and, as a must from IBM, competing sales teams. Customers _really_ liked this when they discovered they bought some Bluemix credits but what they really wanted to use were IaaS. It took a long time for the first integration to arrive, and customers got very happy: paying Softlayer in Bluemix credits and paying Bluemix PaaS through Softlayer billing. Yes, billing was (still is?) split, one went through IBM's order systems, the other through Softlayer's. Of course, there were also a couple of internal competitors for private cloud besides Bluemix Private that competed for customers as well, but let's keep that aside. Besides competition between IBM Cloud aka Softlayer and IBM Software (who later merged), IBM GTS also had their hosting business, with their own datacenters and managed services (that they sold as "cloud", naturally) that offered IBM Power and Z - both never offered through Softlayer, so customers who wanted everything managed for them (so almost every IBM customer) kept their servers at IBM GTS. And then there's the kick: after Ginni's mandate, eventually IBM publicly offered Power servers on Softlayer's platform, and there was much rejoicing. There was just one tiny, little problem: It wasn't IBM Power. It didn't run AIX, just Linux, as Watson ran on Linux. It was closer to a TALOS workstation than to what an IBM customer needed or wanted at all. Imagine saying to a customer that yeah, we've got Power servers! But no, you can't run AIX, but yeah we are IBM and yeah we still make Power servers. Call our friends at IBM Systems, or IBM GTS if you want that hosted for you. Those servers weren't IBM at all, except for the CPU. Not even the most locked-in IBM customer would be able to use IBM Cloud if they wanted - and they wanted to. What, hear the people in the field or the customer? Nah. Crazy times.