IBM CFO Mark Loughridge said in a 2011 interview that his company’s revenues from cloud services will pass the $7 billion mark in 2015, and in 2012 Big Blue’s path to achieve this goal is becoming clearer.  This is at least what InfoWeek’s Charles Babcock believes – here’s a summary of the future he has in mind:

“It’s not just concentrating on devoting new resources to developers or more hosted services in the cloud for large enterprises, something IBM has already done for years. Rather, IBM will present customers with a broad initiative meant to help them leave behind today’s complex and inefficient data center management model and move toward a more cloud-like operation–whether a private cloud on-premise or a private cloud at an IBM data center.”

Many components will drive this growth, including some very specific names in the IT giant’s portfolio. One of them is Starter Kit for Cloud, a private cloud offering that can be used to virtualize Power server-based environments.

As-a-service could also play a very big role in Loughridge’s $7 billion vision. Big Blue’s SmartCloud Services line-up is already fairly popular among enterprises adopting IaaS, and this will be supplemented with hosted software aimed at “targeted groups.” This means something not unlike what Salesforce is doing: tailoring SaaS to sales reps.

These areas are only a few of the sectors IBM is venturing into: developer-centric PaaS and consultancy are also industries the company is involved with and is expanding on. And there are many more as well, including the most recent of which includes mobile app testing.

IBM announced the product of the Green Hat acquisition from earlier this year, arriving in the form of a bigger role in enterprise apps’ lifecycle via testing and cross-platform optimization offered up to clients.