Enterprise Communications Featured Article

When you consider the amount of patents IBM (News - Alert) has, it makes you wonder how any upcoming computer technology could have eluded the company, but that is exactly what has taken place regarding cloud computing. To put in perspective the intellectual property the company continues to amass yearly, you have to go back 21 years to find an organization that had more yearly patents. The top spot in 2013 still belonged to IBM receiving 6,809 U.S. patents, averaging almost 19 per day for the whole year. But now the company has been investing heavily to ensure it is not left behind in what many see as the future of computing: hybrid cloud.

The question is what is IBM going to do, because the company has the intellectual and financial resources to take the number one spot? An article written by Adam Samson on FOX Business looks at how IBM is going after the hybrid cloud computing market as it searches for new opportunities to compensate for the losses it has sustained in its hardware division.

The hybrid approach is especially important for industries with high regulatory compliances such as healthcare and finance. Companies in this field can continue to process sensitive information internally on-premises so they can have better control, but move other projects with low security installations to the cloud.

According to Sampson, IBM is pitching companies to deploy hybrid cloud solutions because it protects valuable and sensitive data on a private cloud and they can move the rest to public cloud data centers IBM manages. With more than 40 data centers around the world and 40,000 cloud computing experts, the company is poised to offer multiple cloud solutions including the next growth market in computing, big data analytics, which it will be able to do on a global scale for organizations big and small.

The company has invested $7 billion on 15 acquisitions of technologies in cloud computing, $1.2 billion in datacenter rollouts and other investments on its cloud division totaling $10 billion. This includes IaaS provider SoftLayer (News - Alert), which came out with a developer-friendly PaaS offering called BlueMix.

In the 2013 annual report, chief executive Virginia Rometty said, "IBM today is the leader in enterprise cloud," while adding "We must acknowledge that while 2013 was an important year of transformation, our performance did not meet our expectations."

It is important to note IBM has everything it needs to take over the market and become a dominant player in the long run. The capital to acquire key resources when it needs it, as well as an annual budget of $6 billion on R&D very few companies or countries around the world are able to compete with.