The International Data Corporation has named IBM as the second leading global Infrastructure as a Service according to its Worldwide Semi-Annual Public Cloud Services Tracker, 2H 2015.

Provisioning servers (virtual and bare metal), storage and networking options were all taken into consideration by the tracker, while also assessing overall market revenue.

IDC says cloud services are about what the customer buys, not how the service provider delivers. Furthermore, it's the definition of cloud services that focuses on what the customer sees and experiences versus the actual delivery.

"Those choices are important but they don't belong in the definition of an offering category like cloud services. This takes us out of the religious wars over what the best implementation architectures and technologies are," the company report read.

Jim Comfort, chief technology officer for IBM Cloud, says they're glad to see IDC recognise the momentum IBM Cloud is making.

"We're seeing customer uptake across the board for all our IaaS capabilities, which allows them to easily pick and scale the IT resources they need to create their ideal public, private or hybrid cloud environments. It all comes down to enabling choice and providing the right mix of services," says Comfort.

According to IDC, IBM Cloud delivers fast, easy and automated access to public, private and hybrid cloud services to help clients digitally transform. IBM Cloud is also a growing collection of services including analytics, mobile, networking, storage, Internet of Things and cognitive computing.

With more than 47 global data centers, its safe to say that IBM Cloud isn't going anywhere anytime soon.