IBM bought ..
customers. Plain and simple. Just like when SalesForce bought Heroku .. Providing public clouds is a difficult undertaking and it takes a long time to develop a customer base. Oh, sure, there are plenty of signups, but over 50% of those generally never come back and the remainder contains just a few percentage points of actually paying customers. So, it is more cost effective to buy somebody else that actually has paying customers than try to spend billions in marketing and sales to woo tightwads. Totally financial move and always necessary if you want to stay in the cloud game and entered late. Dell saw the reality and opted out. HP's effort is valiant but they are so far behind, it may not matter. If you haven't watched the TechEd 2013 videos on the secret stuff Microsoft is revealing to the public this week, you don't know the state of the game. And this cloud game is changing rapidly.