Today IBM communicated to its SmartCloud Enterprise customers that they will have to move to SoftLayer cloud environments - latest by January 31st 2014. This is the first and possibly the largest move between cloud infrastructures the same vendor that has happened so far in the short history of the cloud.
IBM is definitively moving fast here - the SoftLayer acquisition was only announced on July 8th 2013 - and now IBM plans to have all load moved off its previous infrastructure - SmartCloud Enterprise (SCE) in the next three months and a little more.
It's a move not an exodus
As the cloud business matures there are changes on the vendor side - may it be through business changes - or in this case due to an acquisition. The Nirvanix situation, where the vendor went out of business and gave customers 2 weeks to move their data out before servers would be shut down was more a forced exodus than a move. We can only hope that in the future of similar unfortunate events the vendors will give customer a little more time.
In the IBM case it's different as IBM wants SCE customers to move from one IBM infrastructure to another, newer and better (as we think) IBM infrastructure - so it's really a move for customers.
SoftLayer beats SCE
An acquisition can change everything, so IBM praises the SoftLayer datacenters, that have received some well deserved investment recently, the more modern infrastructure, the bare metal capabilities, the integrated and simplified environment with one portal, one API, one platform etc.
So current SCE customers are moving from a 3 star to a 4 star hotel - definitively a better place to stay. They should make sure that they are still paying the 3 star hotel prices... and if not they should make sure that IBM is upfront and clear enough on this.
Establishment of move standards?
As mentioned this is the first major intra vendor infrastructure cloud move. We may see the 3 month time frame that IBM has given to customers to become the new standard for similar situations. And 3 months is certainly better than the 2 weeks like in the Nirvanix situation.
Additionally IBM offers migration tools and documentation, which hopefully will likewise establish a new standard for cloud infrastructure moves.
What about SmartCloud Enterpise+ ?
The hosted offering of SmartCloud Enterprise+ (SCE+) is not affected by this move. In SCE+ IBM runs more complex environments for customers. These may prove (still) to complex for the SoftLayer infrastructure to run - so IBM may have started with the low hanging fruit. But we advise SCE+ customers to actively talk to IBM and find out what the future plans for SCE+ are.
How big is the move?
This was one of the key questions I had with peers and colleagues. At this point only IBM knows how many customers and loads are really in SCE. Maybe it's less than we expect - maybe it's more - we will see if there is potential noise around this announcement for the right (and hopefully not for the wrong) reasons.
MyPOV
Kudos to IBM for moving fast, moving customers to the better offering and communicating this with an appropriate transition time frame. We will have to see how significant a move this is going to be - but it certainly establishes a precedence for the industry - on good and acceptable standards for customers.
