It’s yet another big news from the tech world that the Big Blue has teamed up the America's largest online retailer. IBM and Amazon have announced that they have got into a deal, under which IBM will offer access of its software to ISVs and solution providers via cloud computing services of Amazon.

According to the IBM- Amazon deal, they will offer “pay-as-you-go” access to the "Amazon Machine Images" of the development and production versions of IBM Information Management database servers - DB2 and Informix Dynamic Server databases, IBM Lotus Web Content Management software, IBM WebSphere portal, WebSphere sMash mash-up tool, and middleware products through Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. Paying just Amazon's 10 cents per hour access fee, ISVs can access the images to develop and test applications that run on the IBM software.

IBM also announced that it is planning to bring out Tivoli service management software to the Amazon-hosted products sometime in the future. The company also declared a plan, in which in the next few months, it will provide, on a beta trial basis, the Amazon Machine Images of the software products that its customers and partners can use to run their applications. The plan include an image of Novell's SUSE Linux on Amazon EC2, and the company along with its partner Amazon, will charge a single hourly rate, which yet to be decided, for the entire hosting system.

The currently available IBM software available on EC2 include IBM DB2, IBM Informix Dynamic Server, IBM Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition, and IBM WebSphere Portal Server.

In a statement, the director of strategy and emerging business in the IBM Software Group, Dave Mitchell said, "What we want to do is give our customers and third-party developers as much freedom as we can. The deal with Amazon Web Services also would create opportunities for solution providers to develop new cloud computing implementation services.”

According to Mitchell, the move to help ISV partners take their applications to the cloud computing market is one facet of IBM's broader cloud computing initiative called "Blue Cloud."

IBM reported that based on its processor value units pricing model, the company will create a price guidelines for how the already owners of IBM software can run those applications on Amazon EC2. The company will offer information about the Amazon EC2 deal and cloud computing in general through its website DeveloperWorks.