The development and production versions of IBM Information Management database servers, IBM Lotus content management, and IBM WebSphere portal and middleware products would now be getting pay-as-you-go access by IBM and Amazon.

The announcement is quite interesting as it indicates that IBM holds a good understanding that people want to consume software in the Cloud; however it is not confirmed as to whether anyone is interested presently. But it won't be wrong to say that if IBM does not develop it; then no one would come either.

Here is the full list of presently available IBM software available on EC2.

1.    IBM DB2
2.    IBM Informix Dynamic Server
3.    IBM Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition
4.    IBM WebSphere Portal Server

It is also vital for IBM to develop a method via which they provide their Cloud-based software so that other can follow suit. There have been minor variations in pricing and deployment options between large software vendors, which gives rise to consumer confusion.

The licenses which have already been bought by the existing IBM customers could be used by them while still taking advantage of the elastic nature of AWS to handle spikes and peaks. The value is retained by these licenses, which could also be used to deal with steady state processing needs, with more licenses available (on an hourly basis) in the cloud for peak times.

Some of the uncertainty which can cause potential users to think twice before jumping in to cloud computing could be cleared with this clean and innovative new model. A novel IBM PVU (Processor Value Unit) table will chart between PVUs and the full set of available EC2 instance types.