IBM is launching a series of new cloud computing-related products and services aimed at enterprises, starting with Smart Business and IBM CloudBurst. The company claims it has learned from its previous attempts and the new move would give a much more focused experience with products built for very specific computing tasks.

“Cloud is an important new consumption and delivery model for IT and business services. Large enterprises want our help to capitalize on what this model offers in a way that is safe, reliable and efficient for business,” said Erich Clementi, general manager, Enterprise Initiatives, IBM. “Today’s Smart Business announcement demonstrates that we take this responsibility seriously with cloud investment and solutions targeting the early opportunity. We are responding today as we did assisting enterprises with the shift to e-business and in the embrace of open source and Linux.”

The two initial services are intended for application development and testing and the management of virtual desktops. Smart Business Services will come in two flavors. The first one is designed to be hosted internally, “behind-the-firewall,” by the company using the service named IBM Smart Business Test Cloud. The other one will run on IBM's public cloud based on mostly Linux machines but with Vmware vCenter Server built in. This second one, called Smart Business Development & Test, comes with IBM's full set of development tools, such as the Eclipse IDE, its database system IBM DB2, Rational and WebSphere but also a utility to manage the service. The second product IMB is launching, called CloudBurst, is aimed at companies that desire more control over their cloud computing implementation, and enables customers to build their own cloud solution using IMB software and hardware.

"Based on nearly two years of research and hundreds of client engagements, the IBM Smart Business cloud portfolio is meant to help clients turn complex business processes into simple services. To accomplish this, Smart Business brings sophisticated automation technology and self-service to specific digital tasks as diverse as software development and testing; desktop and device management; and collaboration," the company stated in the press release announcing the new services.