Having worked on BlueMix for awhile, IBM plans to push BlueMix at the IBM Pulse conference that takes place in Vegas this week.  BlueMix will use IBM’s global network of 40 data centers, which the company is building on top of the Softlayer cloud. Keep in mind that, last month, IBM announced it would invest $1.2 billion into building its cloud infrastructure.

These services will leverage the open-source Cloud Foundry framework, currently managed by Pivotal.  It will also offer a developer environment that uses the open source Git repository, and has a Web IDE (integrated development environment), along with Eclipse and Visual Studio plug-ins.

In short, BlueMix is more PaaS than IaaS.  It puts development capabilities in place in the hopes it will attract the attention of people who are moving in droves to AWS, many of whom are existing IBM customers, and encourage them to stop and take a hard look at IBM.  This will continue to be a long trod for IBM, but it’s not a bad move.  The larger issue is that, as they promote cloud, much of the impact will be on IBM hardware and software sales as their own customer base moves to the cloud.  Regardless, they really have no choice at this point.