The SmartCloud services aren't entirely new -- IBM has offered them on a custom basis for some time. But it's the first time they are being widely offered as a listed product with a fixed menu of options, said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive in charge of IBM's software division.

Pricing wasn't immediately available, but some published reports said the basic Enterprise service is comparable in price to Amazon Web Services, or a little more expensive.

They service will compete with those from Hewlett-Packard, among others, which last month. But while HP hasn't said when its offerings will appear, IBM said its Enterprise service is available now worldwide, and Enterprise Plus will follow later this year.

IBM is also offering the products behind the services as a hardware and software package that companies can deploy in their own data centers. It includes numerous Tivoli and Systems Director products, including Tivoli Service Automation Manager and Tivoli Provisioning Manager for Images.

Public and private clouds are "equally valid," Mills said. "There's nothing about the attributes that you can't implement inside a business," including provisioning new apps in a standard, automated fashion across a pool of virtual computing resources.