Nicholas Carr reports a big cloud computing move by IBM:

Today, as a new era in computing dawns, IBM announced another deal, this time with Amazon Web Services, a pipsqueak in the IT business but an early leader in cloud computing. Under the deal, corporations and software developers will be able to run IBM's commercial software in Amazon's cloud. As the Register's Timothy Prickett Morgan reports, "IBM announced that it would be deploying a big piece of its database and middleware software stack on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. The software that IBM is moving out to EC2 includes the company's DB2 and Informix Dynamic Server relational databases, its WebSphere Portal and sMash mashup tools, and its Lotus Web Content Management program ... The interesting twist on the Amazon-IBM deal is that Big Blue is going to let companies that have already bought software licenses run that software out on the EC2 cloud, once the offering is generally available."

This is going to have a pretty big impact on how software like this gets sold and licensed.