Inside IBM's only European Cloud Centre

The IBM Ireland campus is used to having many visitors, and the manager of the facility said that the traffic had begun to increase thanks to the cloud business.

The reason the Irish facility was chosen by IBM for a Cloud Centre was partly down to the presence of the University of Dublin (home of Trinity College) and partly because of stiff lobbying by Michael Martin, Ireland's former Minister for Enterprise, Trade & Employment, according to the worldwide head of IBM's cloud effort, Willy Chui.

"Ireland has a very good educational structure," Chui told ZDNet UK, "and the minister here was important in that choice." He said there was "good support" from the Irish Development Authority.

IBM's campus in Dublin has eight large buildings, and it turned part of one of them over to cloud computing to create its Cloud Centre. The centre is host to people from all over Europe, according to Kristof Kloeckner, vice-president of cloud computing at IBM and the man who was until recently, head of IBM's cloud business.

"We are exploring with customers to find and develop new ideas," he told ZDNet UK. "A particular area we are exploring is service management, for example."

Kloeckner believes that cloud computing's biggest differentiators are its scalability and its ability to provide "delivery as a service", where customers turn their tasks over to IBM for work in the Cloud Centre, and "self-service", where customers perform their own tasks. These are areas that IBM teams are actively exploring, he said.

The IBM cloud infrastructure around the world is composed of nine Cloud Centres and six Customer Centres, the latter available for customers to run their own cloud applications, he said.