IBM’s surprising cloud statistics

 IBM began an aggressive ad campaign (11/4) about its cloud with a full-page advertisement on page A8 of the Wall Street Journal. A replica of the ad appears at right. It clearly conveys the message that IBM's cloud technology is more widespread than Amazon's.

 

The ad illustrates a couple of interesting points. The graphic shows two lines one blue and the other red. IBM is associated with the color blue (as in Big Blue) by default we (correctly) assume that the blue line represents IBM and the red Amazon. The line’s length reflects the difference in the number of customers on each company’s cloud services. IBM’s blue line towers over Amazon’s red line.

Using a question format the text revels that IBM's cloud powers 270,000 more websites that Amazon's. This is surprising. Most people believe that Amazon’s cloud leads in the number of hosted websites. In the small print, we read that IBM's Cloud offerings support 30% more of the most popular websites than anyone else in the world.

The ad doesn’t provide the actual number of websites hosted by Amazon and IBM clouds. So, we checked the Top 500 Hosters at HostCabi.net (11/8/13), IBM (SoftLayer Technologies) was #2 with 358,118 and Amazon was #9 with 74,082. 

Future ads will convey additional, generally unknown facts about IBM's cloud offerings. We like the idea of IBM publicizing the strength of their cloud products. So, we are happy to see this campaign. See more: www.ibm.com/getstarted and http://www.youtube.com/ibm. Very impressive. We look forward to more such  ads.