Feature IBM wants your cloudy dollars – and it’s making an extremely aggressive play to be the market leader in enterprise cloud computing.

In some minds, however, it already is.

Exhibit A: chief executive Virginia Rometty, in an open letter to investors published as part of the company’s 2013 annual report, spelled it out: “IBM today is the leader in enterprise cloud.”

The reason? Investment. Big Blue has shelled out $7bn on 15 acquisitions, with Rometty singling out the purchase of IaaS provider SoftLayer above all else. The latest move was earlier in March, when the company announced it was to push $1bn of resources and investments into cloud, rolling out SoftLayer in new geographies and providing a developer-friendly PaaS offering called BlueMix.

In other words, the 102-year-old International Business Machines now sees itself as a cloud company first and foremost. For Doug Clark (left), cloud leader at IBM …