The 102 year old veteran IT company seems to have taken countless steps toward the development of CloudSmart, the IT giant’s proprietary cloud that, despite its large investments, has not demonstrated any sort of progress… until now, that is. In July, IBM upped its game by announcing its acquisition of Softlayer, an open cloud platform based on both Cloudstack and OpenStack. Although it is being perceived as an enterprise grade IaaS offering, it is still an immature cloud offering. Additionally, IBM cloud marketing guys have been taking the Steve Jobs approach to marketing (against IBM), circa 1984, belittling AWS in every way possible.  While IBM benefits greatly from its trusted name, to me, this strike seems a bit old and not relevant anymore, making me question where my trust actually lies.

Once again, cloud pundits need to mull over the claim, `Enterprise Trusted` . IBM, akin to the other veteran IT players in the room, differentiates its cloud based on its level of security, global scale and consistency. The Amazon Cloud, however, has already proven these can be solved and managed inside its public domain. Similarly, additional features will continue to improve, as Amazon clearly intends to fulfill the needs of the entire enterprise. IT of the largest enterprises in the world, government agencies and the CIA recognized the sense of AWS cloud and already made the investments. Traditional IT guys want prove their existence in the enterprise, and themselves are leading AWS migration projects. The traditional MSPs of traditional IBM alike, already deploy on AWS and are  driven to be even more innovative with their booming new business. All of this work cannot go unmentioned; IBM must recognize and be completely honest in its strategy, without washing the 37K IT experts to be all of a sudden cloud ones.
This brings me to a subject matter I often refer to in situations like these: Kodak’s hubris. They claimed to have a stronghold on the market, and were trapped in the belief that their 120 years of market rule would make the company indestructible…well, we all know what happened to that fairy tale ending. With that, I would like to present Mr. Devine, CTO of Cloud Services at IBM, a few proposals for the prosperous future of the company cloud delivery and marketing manner:
Dear Mr. Devine, CTO of Cloud Services at IBM 
I suggest that the IBM cloud marketing guys to keep an honest manner when dealing with real cloud users. I am sure that you understand the sophisticated DevOp character. These experts already noticed straight away that you try to use dishonest or aggressive marketing techniques, so if you intend on receiving their support, you had better play smarter and aim to be a real thought leader. Moreover, based on the few times I heard you lecture, I tend to believe that within your cloud teams, you make sure not to wash the Cloud and have a structured plan to correctly develop and acquire the right skills.
Instead of doing the ordinary marketing fluff, what you ought to do is make real noise pertaining to actual case studies… even externalizing in details the development of the IBM cloud. That can be very interesting. I say this, because currently, it seems like you are waving your flags of war without any real plan of attack.
Just a few words of advise from an active cloud evangelist.
Also you missed a great Cloud Show in Vegas,
Ofir.