Las Vegas, NV – IBM has revealed that Bluemix Local, the private cloud option of the company’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering will see public rollout this summer and that Canadian partners are among the beta testers.
“We’ve already entered in with beta customers that will work with us through the development process … and we will continue with additional sponsors in the rollout into a formal offering through the IBM machine,” said Damion Heredia, vice president of cloud platform services product management at IBM.
He said that while he was unable to disclose the beta customers, the list includes Canadian companies.
With Local, Bluemix can be installed on a client’s own data centre. According to IBM, a company can choose apps that it wants to run behind the firewall, for example the data, run times, caching, while allocating other functions to run on either a public or IBM dedicated cloud.
Heredia added that it would all be managed as one.
Once publicly available, IBM will offer Bluemix Local as a managed service. In terms of pricing, the company said that it would retain a freemium model for basic usage, with subscription and pay-as-you-go options also available, akin to its existing cloud pricing structures.
Heredia said that he foresees channel partners building apps on Bluemix to offer to customers as services, and that Bluemix would help in pushing for cloud adoption in Canada.
“I hope it opens up the ability for enterprises to have great choice of infrastructure vendors of IBM cloud local to their country that have the transparency and the hybrid nature to be able to connect across the enterprise and back into their systems as well,” said Heredia.