Far from being a cloud pioneer, IBM has spent most of the past few years downplaying services such as Amazon’s as insecure, low-margin businesses of little interest to a serious computing company. “You can’t just take a credit card and swipe it and be on our cloud,” IBM executive Ric Telford told Businessweek in early 2011. The company’s pitch to customers was that it knew them intimately and its cloud system was safer. But thousands of startups, including Dropbox and Netflix, were more than happy to swipe their credit cards and get going on Amazon.