Within hours of Amazon’s announcement of a new Beijing region for Amazon Web Services, IBM jumped into the mix, announcing a new relationship with 21Vianet to offer high-end SmartCloud Enterprise + cloud services from a new 21Vianet-hosted facility in Beijing, Gigaom reports. IBM claimed that while AWS is a “newbie” in China and to enterprise-class workloads generally, IBM has worked with customers in China for years as an enterprise IT provider while AWS “is most known for its support of Netflix.” So there. This is a feisty IBM, obviously stung by losing the $600 million CIA cloud contract to AWS. SmartCloud Enterprise+ is an OpenStack-based cloud for enterprise customers, an IBM spokesman said. IBM characterizes it as an “open standards-based” cloud compared to Amazon’s “proprietary” cloud. You see how this is being played…
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