IBM, Microsoft, and Atlassian all drive cloud adoption

IBM

IBM, Microsoft, and Atlassian all drive cloud adoption

22 October 2020

4 minute read

Image by Patricia Alexandre from Pixabay

There is always something happening somewhere and keeping track of it all can be difficult – to say the least! Our ITAM industry news roundups aim to cover some of the important and interesting developments you may have missed, to help keep you informed and up-to-date. There are a lot of cloud focused updates this time with IBM announcements, Microsoft licensing changes and Atlassian go cloud only…

IBM Containers

IBM have announced new licensing rules for their software when being run in containers AND a new tool with which to manage it all – hooray!

The new rules and metrics are similar to IBM’s existing sub-capacity rules, requiring you to track usage of software where it may run on less than the full physical resources and, in the case of containers, for short periods of time too. The article linked below goes into more details about containers in general and IBM’s new metrics specifically and links to the IBM resource pages too. If you’ve got an IBM environment, this is certainly something to understand and start ensuring you’re compliant.

IBM spinning out Managed Infrastructure Services

Another IBM story – they’ve been busy recently!

IBM have announced that they’re spinning out their “Managed Infrastructure Services” division into a separate company. Currently know as “NewCo”, the business will, according to IBM, be the largest company of its type with $19 billion of annual revenue and is expected to come to life towards the end of 2021.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna explains the move as a way for IBM to increase their “maniacal focus” on cloud and AI. Services currently account for over 60% of IBM’s revenue…selling that off will make “software and solutions” the primary bread winner from then on. IBM spent a lot of money on Red Hat and, coupled with the CEO change, they are clearly keen to make the most of their opportunities and ensure IBM’s ongoing relevance in the new cloud era.

Microsoft end Open licensing

After 20+ years, Microsoft’s Open Licensing Program (OLP) is coming to an end. While it has been out of favour for a while now, the addition of perpetual software licenses to the CSP program – planned GA on Jan 2021 – was the final blow.

Organisations will still be able to buy and renew licenses on OLP up until December 31, 2021 (that’s right – the change kicks in from Jan 1, 2022) and the change appears to apply only to commercial organisations, at least initially.

While many of you won’t purchase via OLP, this is a significant milestone on Microsoft’s journey to the cloud.

Atlassian go cloud only

Atlassian, the creators of Jira as well as several other software products, have announced their move to a cloud-only model. They say they’ve made this move because their customers need them to “move faster and go even further” but do recognise that some organisations will struggle with the transition away from their server products.

The timeline is this:

February 2, 2021
No longer purchase new server licenses
Price increases for renewals & upgrades on several products including Jira, Confluence, and Bamboo

February 2, 2022
End of user tier upgrades/downgrades

February 2, 2023
End of new app sales for existing licenses

February 2, 2024
End of support for all server products

Atlassian’s self-managed Datacenter variants will still be available but they too will see a price increase on February 2, 2021.

IBM, Microsoft, and Atlassian all drive cloud adoption