IBM wins big cloud contract with Marriott

Marriott has long been an IBM customer and today the two announced a deal that will move 80% of Marriott's old-school technology to what's known as a "hybrid" cloud built by IBM.

That means Marriott will keep its data centers but will update them to use the latest cloud technology. And it will also use IBM's cloud to host apps that it doesn't want to host itself.

IBM didn't announce the deal size, but sources said that it was along the lines of some of IBM's other bigger deals. Marriott's infrastructure supports over 4,000 locations worldwide.

This deal sounds roughly equivalent to the $500 million six-year deal IBM signed a year ago with insurance giant The Hartford.

IBM is also announcing contracts with Opera Software of Norway, Kallo Inc. of Canada. and Sohonet of the U.K., but we understand that among these new agreements, the Marriott deal is the biggest of them all.

IBM has been going through a major transformation as revenues have been shrinking across the board from its traditional hardware/software/services business, as enterprises have been moving to cloud computing. The company is laying off workers, while trying to beef up new areas, like cloud.

To that end, it has been broadcasting much news on its cloud customer wins lately, particularly in this area of "hybrid computing" which allows IBM to sell traditional computer hardware and services as well as cloud services.

Last month, it announced agreements with eBay Enterprise (deal size not disclosed) and a five-year $500 million deal with Anthem Health.