IBM is working with 17 European organisations to develop its cloud computing initiative.

Partly funded by a European Union €17m grant, the project will look at managing IT services across domains, IT platforms and geographies. The project is called RESERVOIR - Resources and Services Virtualisation without Barriers.

A release accompanying the announcement cited the online entertainment sector as one possible application, saying that "For example, if there is large demand for a show hosted by a particular site, it could dynamically 'hire' additional servers and services from other sites that are not being used."

Big Blue has been looking at cloud computing for more than ten years. It describes cloud computing as "the internet operating system for business". In November it announced "Blue Cloud" - various offerings aimed at simplifying management of corporate data centres.

At the time, it described the initiative as “as series of cloud computing offerings” which will allow data centres to behave “more like the internet by enabling computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources”.

Blue Cloud embraces open source software, but glued together with IBM's Tivoli systems management software.

Of course, given that IBM has already gotten so far with its cloud divsion, it's a bit of a puzzler that Brussels feels the need to underwrite its further development.

IBM's Haifa lab in Israel is leading the project. ®

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