IBM keeps on with its investment in cloud computing. Now, the company has established a new laboratory in Hong Kong. With this lab, IBM expands the presence of its IBM China Development Laboratory (CDL) – the company's largest laboratory with more than 5,000 developers on staff.

The laboratory builds on the e-mail technology of the Hong Kong-based company Outblaze Limited. Its messaging assets were acquired by IBM earlier this year and they were incorporated into the Lotus brand. The new laboratory is said to be the first of its kind in Hong Kong and it’s important because it shows both the great role of global development teams and IBM's concentration on growth in emerging markets. Emerging markets are a user segment that is theoretically more adaptable to different methods of application consumption and is probably well-acquainted with browser-based applications.

As a whole, we can it can be summarized that during the fourth quarter of 2009 we’ve witnessed several interesting cloud-related announcements from IBM. Among them is the LotusLive service that was launched in October and it’s already claimed to have more than 18 million active users. Big Blue also launched the Cloud Academy program. It’s created to help educators and students follow cloud-computing initiatives and to help them take better advantage of collaboration technology in their studies.

IBM has taken a leading role in the development and adoption of cloud services while other large vendors such as SAP, HP, Oracle, Sun and Microsoft have all made cloud-oriented announcements with few proof points that their efforts will be successful. We can never be sure that IBM will be successful either, but at least we have to admit that the company has made coherent progress in both technology and customers’ needs.

IBM representatives explained that the company will keep on concentrating on delivering "the most reliable and secure cloud services" and they will be designed to meet the needs of consumers as well as their enterprise buying clients. Totally logical and still surprising that the other big vendors haven't figured out how to attract their core user base to cloud platforms and services.