Dive Brief:

• Comcast Business announced last week it will partner with IBM to provide enterprise customers direct links to IBM Cloud.

• Under the partnership, Comcast Business customers can now get up to 10 Gbps of private network connectivity to IBM Cloud for public, private or hybrid cloud deployments, according to the announcement. 

• The move allows Comcast customers more connectivity choices to "store data, optimize their workloads, and execute mission-critical applications in the cloud," in either on- and off-premise environments, or in a hybrid setting, according to Jeff Lewis, vice president of data services at Comcast Business.

Dive Insight:

The partnership should help bring Comcast more visibility as a cloud-savvy provider while enabling IBM to further expand its enterprise cloud services.

According to IBM, companies that can connect directly to the cloud via dedicated connectivity get "better performance, security and availability" compared to those that connect to the cloud over the internet. The two companies are hoping that by putting their two offerings together will appeal to more enterprise customers looking to move to the cloud.

IBM has been among the leaders in cloud, but like Google and Microsoft, IBM is pulling out all the stops to try to catch Amazon Web Services (AWS). A study released by Synergy Research Group in February found AWS now controls about 40% of the cloud market, while Microsoft, Google and IBM together control only about 23%.