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After announcing some cloud related intiatives yesterday, IBM has teamed up with Amazon Web Services to offer IBM middleware products on EC2 running Suse Linux. This includes IBM DB2, IBM Lotus^® content management, and IBM WebSphere^® portal. This is significant for Amazon as it helps them to position themselves as a serious enterprise player. The AMIs are available in IBM's Cloud Computing Space.

Along with Open Source databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL, Amazon has already teamed up with Oracle to offer Oracle on the Clouds. By adding DB2 to its kitty, Amazon is positioning itself as a major player in the cloud infrastructure space. In the beginning of this year, while offering my predictions for 2009, I was talking about a big push in the enterprise side. If the trends so far are ny indication, we will definitely see a changed landscape by the end of this year. Even though this news is not all that significant like Microsoft's announcement of Windows Azure, it is pretty important from enterprise cloud computing point of view.

While I am at this news, I want to point towards an article by Tim Jones at IBM Developerworks, titled Cloud Computing With Linux. In this post, he talks about the role of Linux and Open Source in the Cloud Computing landscape. Check it out.