One of the key questions for Amazon.com's cloud computing business is whether it can move beyond its early adopter base of web startups to bring in large enterprise customers. Today, Amazon took a major step that direction with a wide-ranging partnership deal with IBM. IBM will use Amazon Web Services to deliver a range of software products. The deal could further validate Amazon's web services platform among companies that have been hesitant about moving applications to the cloud.

IBM will offer software in in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) on a "pay-as-you-go" basis, the fee model Amazon uses. IBM customers can use already-purchased IBM software on EC2, and IBM is making some tools available for free on EC2 for developing and testing applications built on IBM software (with hourly pricing to be rolled out later).

IBM customers will have access to IBM DB2, Informix Dynamic Server, WebSphere Portal, Lotus Web Content Management, WebSphere sMash and Novell's SUSE Linux operating system software on EC2.

Amazon doesn't break out revenue from its cloud-computing business, so it's hard to get a read on the growth of the business. In a recent interview with TechFlash, Andy Jassy, the head of Amazon Web Services, said the company always expected enterprise customers would take some time to "kick the tires" of cloud computing before making any moves, but he said enterprise adoption is "happening much sooner than we anticipated."

Linking up with corporate IT services giant IBM could help Amazon with bigger customers. "As someone who once programmed IBM mainframes using 80 column punched cards, this is a pretty exciting announcement," blogged Jeff Barr, Amazon's web services evangelist.

Amazon has been ramping up its web services business, which leverages the vast infrastructure Amazon has built up over the years to run its ecommerce engine and makes some of that capacity available to outside developers in the form of storage, computing and other services. Along with IBM, Amazon also has web services partnerships with Oracle, Red Hat, Sun, MySQL, Facebook, and Saleforce.com.