IBM Corp.’s emerging infrastructure-as-a-service platform now has another major feature over the competition: the ability for organizations to host the off-premise ends of their OpenStack hybrid cloud in its data centers. The launch of the service comes less than 90 days after it absorbed the underlying technology through the purchase of Blue Box Group Inc. for an undisclosed sum.

The decade-old outfit started its life as a traditional web host and switched gears a few years ago in response to the shift towards more flexible consumption models, choosing to to head down the open-source route for lack of resources to compete with the giants of the proprietary camp. The pivot produced an OpenStack-based managed cloud for large enterprises.

That platform is now available through IBM’s global network of data centers, which means that a customer can spin up their deployment in a facility close to their offices to minimize latency for their end-users. The reach of the company’s physical footprint is especially useful for large organizations with branches spread out over multiple regions.

And it’s just as valuable for cloud service providers that support customers spread out over equally big distances and demand the same quick response times as workers in a global enterprise. That’s one of the reasons why Cloudsoft Inc., an application management specialist, tapped IBM to provide the infrastructure for its commercial implementation of the Apache Brooklyn automation software.

The value proposition is especially appealing for organizations that already have an OpenStack environment behind their firewall and wish to extend its capacity with resources from the outside. But it remains to be seen whether IBM’s new service can effectively compete over the majority of enterprises that have not yet embraced the project and merely seek a cost-effective platform on which to run their off-premise workloads.

Photo via SDTimes