Today IBM announces its latest steps in Cloud computing. Followers of this blog - as well as scores of others - will know that this is but one in a regular stream of such announcements.

Why? Because IBM is out to own the Cloud. It may be a softly-softly approach with great respect shown to all parties but the trend is unmistakeable.

It’s all open systems, folks, nothing proprietary. What would you like, private Cloud or public Cloud. You’re not sure? How about hybrid Cloud then? Only pay for what you need – just like software as a service.

IBM says Cloud is industrialisation of delivery of the IT process. It has identified the key concerns and appears to be ready through its consultancy services to address them. Many potential customers baulk at the challenge of moving from legacy to cloud. ‘Forget apps, break it down into workloads’, says IBM. Figure what sort of workload. If it’s a highly transactional, low latency, highly optimised with big rework costs, then leave it be for the time being. If the workload is or can be standardised, it may be a candidate to run from the Cloud. If the workload is one you would love to get enhanced but don’t have the resources, it may be you can use what’s in the Cloud to do so.

Security is an ever present concern and even more so where the Cloud is concerned. The attraction of the private Cloud (within the corporate firewall) is unmistakeable. In research undertaken by IBM, while public or private Clouds are seen as equally acceptable for web conferencing, a workload like transactional databases has very little traction in the public space although quite acceptable in the private.

The IBM offerings today are of Lotus Live iNotes (starting at $3 per user per month) and Smart Business Storage Cloud (for enterprises with active-active architecture and unlimited scaleability). Driving everything along are the consultancy services - IBM Strategy & Change Services for Cloud Adoption, the same for Cloud Providers and IBM Testing Services for Cloud.

It may not be on the IBM published Cloud road map but be assured the apps will be rolling out steadily. Remember how Express grew and grew just like Topsy as more and more apps were added to the portfolio? In just the same way as Express was grown, so with Cloud: Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud is the persuader to get developers on board. Just go to http://www.ibm.com/cloud/developer to have a look-see.

And on this Cloud development journey, what firms might be acquired?