IBM claims to be the king of cloud, but Amazon thinks otherwise

Is it possible that IBM’s new cloud computing services business unit, the one that got suddenly bigger last year after the acquisition of SoftLayer, is bigger than cloud computing’s dominant player, Amazon Web Services? It turns out that it is, but it’s not a very good comparison. It all depends on what you consider to be “the cloud”.

Cloud reporters got a pitch from IBM Friday — the morning after Amazon’s fourth quarter earnings announcement – claiming that it, not Amazon Web Services leads the leagues in cloud since it plunked down $2 billion on SoftLayer over the summer. As an IBM PR rep helpfully pointed out: Amazon’s full-year “other” North America revenue which includes AWS was $3.9 billion while IBM’s comparable number was $4.4 billion.