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Companies that want the benefits of modern cloud computing without the cloud turn to private cloud services in order to achieve that goal, and IBM has a new version of its private cloud software available for those potential customers.

IBM Cloud Private 2.1 is now available, and it lets customers run applications on their own infrastructure in a cloud-friendly matter, with built-in support for Docker’s container platform and the Kubernetes container-orchestration software. It also comes with a feature that allows those on-premises workloads to shift into a variety of public clouds for customers looking to take a hybrid approach.

It’s not so much a trend any more, but reality: companies no longer need to be sold on the benefits of the public cloud, but they are hesitant to break their existing legacy but important applications that are running on their own servers. Private clouds and hybrid approaches make it easier to have it both ways, and the big public cloud vendors have all rolled out hybrid services and partnerships as they court bigger and older companies.

This could be an edge for older tech companies like IBM and Microsoft, who most likely have a longstanding vendor relationship with many companies that still want to manage their own workloads for compliance or security reasons. Earlier this year Microsoft rolled out Azure Stack, a similar product, and newer enterprise vendors like Amazon Web Services and Google have also introduced new services aimed at this type of customer.

According to IDC, private cloud deployments are growing (see below), but not nearly as quickly as the public cloud. That’s backed up by the earnings results last week of AWS and Microsoft, who saw revenue growth of 42 percent and 90 percent, respectively, from their public cloud services.

IT growth public private clouds IDC
(Source: IDC)
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