IBM at the event Thursday, under the umbrella name of the IBM SmartCloud.

One, the Enterprise service, is an infrastructure-as-a-service offering similar to those from Amazon Web Services. Customers can deploy Windows or Linux applications in IBM data centers and IBM says it will guarantee 99.5 percent uptime annually.

The other, Enterprise Plus, offers higher levels of security and a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee, plus the option to run virtual machines on dedicated hardware, rather than servers shared with other customers, and the option to use AIX as well Windows and Linux.

Enterprise Plus users also get more flexible management, security and availability options. IBM will manage just the hardware and hypervisors, for example, or almost any combination of the OS, middleware, application or entire business process.

"IBM is trying to go a step further than the standard cloud offerings already out there, in terms of security, reliability and availability," said IDC analyst Jean Bozman.