IBM Will Announce Its Public Cloud Initiative on Tuesday

(MoneyWatch)  IBM (IBM) is readying the announcement of its cloud computing initiative on Tuesday. Earlier this month, Boomberg BusinessWeek ran a story about the company's plan to let corporations implement applications on the web. And I just received an email that IBM "will launch its commercial cloud service for software development and test" on Tuesday. I was offered an advance look at a press release if I'd agree to embargo the results, but I generally don't do embargoes, especially when someone doesn't ask before sending information.

According to BusinessWeek, IBM expects businesses to use hybrid models, in which some services stay within corporate firewalls and some are on public clouds. This isn't surprising because IT departments move far more slowly and carefully than people realize. Rackspace (RAX) plans a similar hybrid approach.

There has been some criticism of IBM's approach as playing catch up to Microsoft (MSFT):

IBM has lagged behind Microsoft in developing a public cloud, said James Staten, an analyst at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research Inc."They're circling the wagon, they're corralling the troops, and they're saying 'This is a battle we have to win,'" said Staten. "But there's a lot more marketing than meat."

Microsoft is "well ahead of IBM" in offering corporate cloud programs via the Internet, Staten said. Its Azure product also lets customers develop software on the Web.

There's just one glitch in this criticism. IBM is far more experienced at running mission-critical applications for corporations than Microsoft. I'd expect a well thought-out strategy from Big Blue. In fact, IBM essentially demonstrated its direction last October when it announced a Cognos 8 mash-up service. Even though corporations were supposed to use that on an intranet, the concept of gluing together existing applications and data sources is compelling and applicable to a public cloud.

It further explored the topic when it made its Tivoli monitoring software available on Amazon's (AMZN) web services. IBM has some enormous corporate IT resources that it can make available on a public cloud. That could thoroughly trump a competitor getting to the party first.

Cloud image via RBGStock.com user sundstrom, site standard license.