Not only are businesses investing in the cloud, but it's become even more established in the technical landscape, according to the 2011 IBM Global Tech Trends Report.

IBM has integrated components to create the Industry Application Platform image and made it available on Amazon’s EC2 and IBM’s SmartCloud services. The image includes WebSphere Application Server, DB2 Express-C and WebSphere MQ, and is configured to execute on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11.

IBM Smart Business Development and Test Cloud helps you assess, plan, design and implement a flexible development and testing private cloud environment to help save capital and operating costs as well as reduce test cycle times, complexity and risks.

If you want to discuss cloud concepts with IT experts and technology practitioners. If you need to find answers to simple or complex cloud computing challenges. If you have experience and answers to share when it comes to harnessing the power of cloud computing. Then you want to participate in developerWorks, a professional, social-software-driven network (as well as a unified set of community tools) that will help you connect, share, and collaborate with the range of IT professionals who have a stake in cloud computing.

With the IBM SmartCloud Simulator you will experience how easy it is to use the IBM SmartCloud. This interactive tour through the IBM SmartCloud will show you several ways that you can use and manage this exciting product to provide your business the IT resources you need to your unique workloads.

IBM SmartCloud Enterprise is an agile cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) designed to provide rapid access to security-rich, enterprise-class virtual server environments, well suited for development and test activities and other dynamic workloads. Ideal for both IT and application development teams, the IBM SmartCloud delivers cloud-based services, systems and software to meet the needs of your business. Please fill in the information below, so we can schedule a demo with you. An IBM representative will contact you within 24 hours.

IBM SmartCloud Enterprise is an agile cloud computing infrastructure as a service (IaaS) designed to provide rapid access to security-rich, enterprise-class virtual server environments, well suited for development and test activities and other dynamic workloads. Ideal for both IT and application development teams, the IBM SmartCloud delivers cloud-based services, systems and software to meet the needs of your business.

IBM Business Process Manager is a comprehensive business process management platform giving you visibility and insight to manage business processes. It scales smoothly and easily from an initial project to a full enterprise-wide program. IBM Business Process Manager harnesses complexity in a simple environment to break down silos and better meet customer needs.

IBM SmartCloud Provisioning, a true IaaS solution that enables you to build a low-touch, highly scalable cloud, reduces costs and offers near-zero downtime and automated recovery.

Thoughts on Cloud is a collection of cloud computing conversations led by IBMers and sponsored by IBM. The site provides a forum to discuss and debate various cloud computing topics. Our intention is to cultivate a dialogue, so we hope you'll join the conversation and share some of the content you find here with your colleagues and friends. We don't expect to answer all of the questions raised, but we look forward to thoughtful and lively discussions with the greater cloud computing community. All postings represent the opinions of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

During this webcast, Mark Weber and David Carew explore cloud products, the Industry Application Platform, and demonstrate how IBM makes it easier for you to take advantage of this evolution in creating your industry vertical applications.

The cloud affords economies of scale that application developers need to help accelerate development of scalable applications, leveraging the full benefits of available resources. In this article, the authors introduce the concepts that extend the developer pool for creating business logic for web dialogs to better leverage your cloud applications. See how true application acceleration actually works using Alphinat SmartGuide.

Many businesses and industries depend on web-based software to run business processes, conduct transactions, and deliver services to customers. When a deadline looms, organizations may get frantic and sacrifice secure features to bring the application into production. This is a fast (and reactive) solution that results in a usually defective application. A better, proactive solution is to create a SaaS-oriented web application vulnerability mitigation policy (and employ a SaaS-based vulnerability scanner) into place that anticipates application vulnerabilities and has several solutions to repair them ready to go. The author will provide a roadmap to such a policy and illustrate using a scanner tool in the form of IBM Rational AppScan products.

An IBM Certified Solution Architect - Cloud Computing Infrastructure V1 is a person who can demonstrate the design, plan, architecture and management principles of an IBM cloud computing infrastructure. They can do this with limited assistance from support, documentation or relevant subject matter experts.

Release 2.0 of the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise introduces several new features. Two of these features are the ability for an IBM SmartCloud Enterprise account to have multiple virtual private network tunnels (VPNs) into a IBM SmartCloud Enterprise data center and multiple virtual local area networks (VLANs) in each data center. The authors examine the details of these new features.

Learn some considerations that new software as a service (SaaS) vendors need to take into account when developing applications or modifying existing ones to enable them for multi-tenancy on the cloud. The article discusses the considerations only from a database perspective -- specifically, from an IBM DB2 perspective. Six cases or methods are described.

The Internet is a very hostile place for a server to be running. Security is a crucial element of any deployment of compute resources within an enterprise and even more important when moving those resources beyond the physical walls of an enterprise. With the growth of cloud-based infrastructures, sometimes inexperienced or unaware users do not consider how important security is in a public cloud. In this article, the authors discuss some of the topics which need to be considered when a virtual machine (VM) is provisioned in IBM SmartCloud Enterprise.

Virtual images allow users to freeze-dry preferred software environments and deliver them to users in a rapid and consistent manner: As a result, companies are turning to virtual images as a means to improve software delivery within their data centers. As they make greater use of virtual images, challenges are emerging -- such as determining how much content to put into a single image and how best to construct these images. The authors discuss these challenges and introduce the IBM Image Construction and Composition Tool (ICCT), freely available for download, that addresses many of these challenges and provides a systematic approach to constructing virtual images in the cloud.