IBM is moving as fast as it can into cloud computing, wooing startups from Silicon Valley to London in hopes that young born-to-cloud companies will use its technology as opposed to, say, the stuff from Amazon Web Services.

A few proof points: Last week, the company launched BlueMix Garage at London’s Level39 accelerator to foster collaboration between startups and IBM tech eggheads. (IBM launched the inaugural BlueMix Garage in San Francisco in April. BlueMix is the company’s Cloud Foundry-based Platform as a Service. Last week, IBM also announced a private or dedicated version of BlueMix that runs on a cordoned off section of the SoftLayer public cloud.

The previous week, IBM said under a new program qualifying startups could get up to $120,000 in credits towards the use of IBM SoftLayer, BlueMix PaaS and associated products. That’s $20,000 more than Google has put up; and significantly higher than the $25,000 in credits AWS typically provides.

Facing a gigantic competitor

But then again, IBM has to offer more. It still lacks the mind share and market share of leader AWS. All of this is a good start towards winning startups over, but nowhere near enough.

SOURCE: gigaom.com