Having thrown a little sand at IBM’s lack of a cloud compute service, I read the recent headlines about IBM Webspan with some trepidation. Geek’s.com proclaimed “IBM announces WebSpan, the first Windows Azure alternative,” gulp, had IBM really created a massive cloud service to rival the scope of Azure?

No: desite the hyperbolic headline this is an existing SaaS business integration provider named Hubspan building a Websphere based extension to its platform. Hubspan/Webspan is not a general compute platform; instead it is business integration SaaS with existing integration customers such as Visa. As I detailed in my initial piece, the economic pressures and operational challenges of a generalized compute cloud remain unattractive to big blue. If Azure wants to be the OS for the next 50 years, backed by massive data-center investments, Webspan is hardly comparable in scope or investment.

This is a great win for Hubspan who can now shout about being the foundation of the IBM cloud. IBM has some history of being late to markets and enriching partners while they wait to act.

For its part Websphere has kept the IBM brand in the cloud discussion with partnerships like this, and regular updates to a nifty cloud developer page. Their developer portal hosts a proof of concept ‘cloud’ for sales demonstrations by partners (shrug). But why do they need service providing partners when they are owned by the largest IT service company in the world?

Sometimes big companies operate more like a collection of smaller and financially independent ones. Websphere’s  pursuit of  service partners for clouds is for better or worse an example of this phenomena. Enriching a partner in a critical new space is, well, classic IBM.