IBM and Microsoft Buddy-Up--for a Change

Posted by: Steve Hamm on September 22

Even though Microsoft and IBM don’t compete directly that much, the bad blood seems to run deep between them. Is it possible they’re still pissed off at each other over OS/2? Hard to believe. Or maybe it’s the beef over Open Document Format? For whatever reasons, you don’t often find them lined up on the same side on an issue. So I was surprised to see the two as founding members of an open source initiative launched by Zend Technologies, the company behind the popular PHP software programming language, to encourage the use of PHP in cloud computing.

The initiative, called Simple API for Cloud Application Services, is like Java was supposed to be in the early days of the Internet: If a corporation or independent software company writes an application with PHP to run in a cloud computing environment, they’ll be able to use application programming interfaces and adapters that make it possible to easily move the application to another cloud service provider. Since PHP is the programming language for more than one third of today’s Internet applications, this is a big deal. “This will accelerate adoption of cloud computing,” Zend CEO Andi Gutmans told me. “We’re on a very good trajectory, but this will make more developers comfortable and it will lower barriers to entry. They can build applications in house and deploy them anywhere.”

Vijay Rajagopalan, the principal architect of the Interoperability Team at Microsoft, was on the call. I tried to provoke him into saying something interesting about the fact that Microsoft and IBM were on the same side of an issue for once—to no avail.

To me, what this episode of strange bedfellows signals is that the battle lines aren’t being drawn yet in the nascent cloud computing world. Everybody’s placing their bets, and interoperability and open standards seems likely to be central to making this big shift actually happen. When hostile giants are aligned, it’s a good day for everybody who uses the Web for business or pleasure.

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