In June of this year, IBM unveiled its cross-company strategy to capture the enterprise cloud computing market, helping clients attack rising costs and complexity by workload. Since then many products and services from the portfolio have entered the market, including Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud, which began its public beta on October 1, 2009. Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud includes Software Delivery Services from Rational Software and is designed to accelerate organizations' development and test cycles.
"Test represents an outstanding example of a workload that is custom-made for the cloud," observes Mike Hill, IBM vice president of Cloud Services. "Typically an organization has 50% to 75% of their infrastructure that is dedicated to test and, while the entire infrastructure is typically utilized at 15%, the least utilized infrastructure is the development and test infrastructure which has utilization down in the low single digits-so it is a perfect workload from a workload characteristic standpoint for the cloud."
The cloud approach to testing greatly accelerates application development and it also provides a significant increase in user satisfaction because instead of the user putting in requirements and waiting for them to be physically set up, they can now can now go into a very easy self-help portal, select the configuration they want, and in a few minutes, have what they need. And, if they make a mistake, they can also go back and change the configuration in a matter of minutes, Hill notes.
"Plus, if you ask an organization to set up a test environment and you say do it two times in a row, they won't get it the same both times. In this environment, you can click to save your image and the next time you come back up, you restore that image and you have the same thing again so the reduction in errors is over 30%," Hill points out. "It is a tremendous use of the cloud in a low-risk environment."
A complimentary technology preview of this public cloud, is now available. For more information, go here.