The record attendance at IBM’s recently concluded Pulse 2014 summit speaks to how far the transitioning technology company has come in its journey to become an “Amazon for the enterprise,” as SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier puts it. The cloud show drew some 11,000 practitioners and executives, an estimated 70 percent of whom attended the event for the first time – a sign that Big Blue is gaining momentum.

IBM is aiming for $7 billion in annual cloud revenues by 2015, a target that CEO Virginia Rometty is hoping to meet with an aggressive product roadmap that focuses equally on homegrown innovation and strategic acquisitions such as SoftLayer, which took center stage at the conference. Appearing on theCUBE’s opening segment alongside co-host and Wikibon chief analyst Dave Vellante, Furrier hailed the deal as a key enabler in the vendor’s efforts to blur the lines between public and private cloud computing with value-added services.

Middleware services

 .

“This next chapter of innovation is around really delivering value, and that’s around cloud equals growth for not only the companies selling the hardware and software but also the customers,” Furrier remarks. “SoftLayer is going to come into its own as a key part of the strategy, but not just SoftLayer, it’s going to be IBM retooling around SoftLayer providing the middleware, new software architectures – open frameworks, the modern operating system, modern infrastructure.”

Big Blue confirmed its commitment to these trends with the recent integration of its Power Systems into the SoftLayer infrastructure-as-a-service platform. In conjunction, the vendor became a founding member of the newly established Cloud Foundry Foundation, which will focus on driving the adoption of the open source platform among developers. The latter announcement is especially significant because, as Vellante notes, “you gotta have the developer, the eyes and ears, in order to win in the cloud game.”

• Winning the developers is winning in cloud

Engaging developers is a big part of IBM’s strategy, which Wikibon senior analyst Stu Miniman believes has matured remarkably over a relatively short period of time. In a follow-up discussion with Furrier and Vellante, he observes that “the general vibe is people feel that IBM has a really coherent and good story on the cloud. If you were to ask most of us only 18 or 24 months ago the message was kind of fragmented – typical IBM, they’ve got 20 different products in 20 different groups.”

The acquisition of SoftLayer helped change that, giving Big Blue a base to build on. “SoftLayer is the glue that’s going to put everything together, it’s the foundation and all of the services will sit on top of it,” according to Miniman.

IBM’s tactics to take on AWS

 .

Some in the industry do not consider the platform as to be true contender to Amazon, but IBM is quickly bridging the gap, making big strides towards pricing transparency and simplified resource consumption. At the same time, the company is also doubling down on the existing strengths of SoftLayer, providing customers with an even wider choice of server, storage and network configurations than before as opposed to one-size-fits-all virtual machines a la AWS. That’s an important differentiator that sets the vendor’s offering apart from the pack, and it’s far from being the only one.

Vellante points at IBM’s massive global infrastructure footprint as another major advantage, mentioning that the company is planning to open another 15 data centers by the end of the year. The move aims to make it easier for international customers to meet local compliance regulations, he explains, a compelling proposition bolstered by Big Blue’s broad portfolio of consultancy and implementation services. The end goal is to make the hybrid cloud viable for the enterprise.

“For IBM it’s all about visibility, automation and control. IBM is playing its hand with SoftLayer, and also playing its field with the hybrid piece … the ability to go from private to public and back in a seamless fashion, that’s something IBM is really emphasizing,” Vellante details in a subsequent session on theCUBE. Security is also high on the company’s agenda, he continues, especially in the context of mobile.

At the end of the day, IBM and other traditional vendors are essentially playing catch up with Amazon, which started the public cloud race and continues to set the pace to this very day. But the battle is far from won, and Furrier believes that “developers will be the telltale sign for who is going to really move the ball in the PaaS layer and ultimately win the enterprise cloud business.”