Without a doubt, Big Blue executives expect the alliance to make IBM Cloud a more convincing alternative to Amazon Web Services, the king of today's cloud computing. The agreement will allow IBM to outsource several security features while granting Cloudflare access to the IBM customer network through a resale agreement.
John Considine, general manager of IBM's cloud infrastructure, tells Fortune that the product package will "dramatically simplify things for end-users". Integration, he adds, will allow IBM customers to easily add Cloudflare defenses, including Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) shields and firewalls to filter out malicious Internet traffic .
For Cloudflare, the agreement represents the third reseller agreement signed with leading cloud providers in recent years. The company already has similar relationships with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. (Note the absence of Amazon)
Chris Merritt, Cloudflare's Chief Revenue Officer, describing the reasoning behind the deal, explains that "the simplest way to market a product is to buy existing relationships, as was the case with IBM for a long time. "
IBM was the third largest cloud provider with a market share of around 8% by the end of 2017, according to the February report by Synergy Research Group, a Reno, Nevada-based market research firm. Amazon took first place with about a third of the cloud computing market, while Microsoft had 13%.
The IBM-Cloudflare alliance comes shortly after IBM posted its first revenue growth for a long time, reversing a downward trend that has affected the company for 22 quarters. The deal also comes after an avalanche of devastating DDoS attacks that have affected businesses with massive floods of Internet traffic destined for web servers.
Prince claims that corporate defense against such attacks is an "anchor feature" for Cloudflare, which was one of the first companies to call attention to the new DDoS attack method that boosts the strength of the month latest.
"It's good in our wheelhouse to stop us," he says.
