IBM has been active in the private cloud market for some time, with a particular interest in providing clouds optimised to the needs of specific verticals such as healthcare. Yesterday the company entered the (enterprise) public cloud space with SmartCloud, beginning to compete directly with the likes of Amazon and Rackspace. Like HP, IBM will have an advantage when it comes to dealing with CIOs and CTOs inside large traditional enterprises; both companies understand the language, the concerns, the politics and the lead-times of big business, and big business already knows the HP/IBM reputation — and their local sales rep. Unlike HP, IBM appears to actually have something concrete to offer, and SearchCloudComputing and Christian Reilly are amongst those taking an early look past the web site’s welcome page. And, as Derrick Harris correctly identifies, “SmartCloud is nothing particularly groundbreaking, but that’s kind of the point. IBM wanted to build an easy-to-use, intuitive service that took advantage of IBM’s broad software portfolio and experience managing infrastruture for demanding companies, and that’s what it did.”