IBM eases out Bluemix name, rebrands all as IBM Cloud

IBM has rebranded its cloud, subsuming the Bluemix brand into an overall IBM Cloud offering.

Writing in a blog post announcing the move, Michael Mendenhall, chief marketing officer for IBM’s Watson and cloud arms, said the move was logical as the two brands had grown to be synonymous. There will be no changes to products offerings as a result of the move, while communications will start referring only to IBM Cloud and product names will change.

“Our goal is to provide a cloud that is easy to use, unified across multiple deployments and the world leader in supporting mission critical workloads,” Mendenhall wrote. “As part of our ongoing work to build the cloud designed for you, we are unifying the public, private, hybrid and multi-cloud under one brand. We are the IBM Cloud…the cloud for your business.”

When the platform as a service (PaaS) Bluemix was first launched, in 2014, pundits argued the PaaS opportunity was an interesting one for IBM to explore. “The Bluemix platform is the closest we’ve seen to something that can match Microsoft’s Azure when it comes to the developer experience,” wrote Gary Barnett for Ovum at the time. “If IBM continues to enhance the platform and can bring on enough partners, Bluemix could transform the PaaS market.”

Earlier this week, IBM announced the launch of IBM Cloud Private, which aimed to help give public cloud agility to private cloud or on-premises environments. As this publication has frequently explored, not everything can sit comfortably atop the public cloud. An example IBM gave of this was in the financial space, where security and regulatory concerns with customer data are key. The knotty stuff could remain in the private cloud, while, using IBM’s new product, the financial company could leverage analytics and machine learning in the public cloud.

Read more: IBM’s latest launch aims to take cloud-native benefits to private clouds