Technology giant IBM has now kicked off a new marketing campaign in India related to cloud services, which is aimed directly at rival Amazon Web Services (AWS). According to a new report from the Economic Times, IBM, which already has a campaign in the US targeting Amazon, has now started the same in India. The aim of the campaign, according to the source, is to show IBM to be the bigger and better provider of cloud-computing services.The direct attacks come after IBM lost out to AWS on a $600 million cloud services contract from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the US. The company, at the time, had contested the decision, but lost out again after the court ruled in favor of Amazon. Sudhanshu Bhandari, senior analyst with Forrester Research, said in a conversation with the source, "After losing the federal contract, IBM is trying to win lost ground and build thought leadership globally." Current estimates of the revenue from cloud computing services stand at around $3 billion a year, increasing IBM’s reason to aggressively hit out against its rival.
IBM hits out against Amazon in new marketing campaign (Image credit: ZDNet)
While Amazon is currently leading in this segment, the analyst feels that IBM’s recent acquisition of SoftLayer Technologies, a dedicated server, managed hosting and Cloud computing provider, increases the latter’s chances of getting back into the race. According to Bhandari, “Over the last few quarters, IBM has been struggling and has continued to see a drop in revenue from traditional business. With SoftLayer, they are trying to take the public cloud story forward."As the cloud computing market in India continues to see growth, the campaign shows that IBM wants to replace Amazon as the one companies can go to for renting cloud space on a pay-as-you-go model. The company, through its advertisements, claims to have 2.7 lakh more customers on its Cloud platform compared to Amazon. Its global revenues from cloud-related services reportedly touched $1 billion in the last quarter. While nearly $460 million was generated from services, the balance was picked up from hardware costs incurred while setting up cloud-based infrastructure for customers. While Amazon has not officially said anything yet, a recent press briefing found Head of Amazon Web Services Andy Jassy saying that IBM was “jumping up and down” and “creating confusion among customers.” Counter balancing this point, Vamsicharan Mudiam, IBM’s country manager for Cloud solutions in South Asia, said that the key point of difference for the company was its “higher value Cloud, which is open and higher value cloud, which is open and interoperable as well as reliable. IBM's SoftLayer performs up to 10 times faster than our competitors and offers hundreds of hardware configurations."Bringing a balanced opinion to this conflict, Venu Reddy, Research Director at IDC India, said, "I would not look at this tussle going on for long, because both have different strategies. While Amazon has been a public cloud major, offering computing space in a common infrastructure, IBM builds customised private cloud where companies host data within their premises. But they have grey areas, and Amazon is posing a big threat to IBM there."
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