IBM announced on Wednesday the launch of its SmartCloud Application Services -- a platform-as-a-service, which has been termed by many as a crucial step for the company in the cloud-computing arena.

According to the company, the application framework brings along the scope for efficiently carrying out life-cycle-management, the ability to maintain packaged application suites, as well as middleware-as-a-service.

Vice president of cloud computing and growth initiatives at IBM, Lauren States claims that the company had carried out an extensive study on its enterprise customers to evaluate how they were implementing on the deployment aspect of their applications. It was the study, that led the company to develop the predefined deployment environments as a service in the offering.

“We’ve re-purposed parts of the portfolio for use as a service,” said States in a statement, according to a SD Times report.

“Our team has been understanding application deployment patterns and codifying them so they can be used in a repeated basis. We’ve looked at how things such as Web apps are commonly deployed,”  she added.