Intro IBM Pulse 2014 with John Furrier and Dave Vellante @thecube #ibmpulse The record attendance at IBM's recently concluded Pulse 2014 summit speaks to how far the transitioning technology company has come in its journey to become an "Amazon for the enterprise," as SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier puts it. The cloud show drew some 11,000 practitioners and executives, an estimated 70 percent of whom attended the event for the first time -- a sign that Big Blue is gaining momentum. IBM is aiming for $7 billion in annual cloud revenues by 2015, a target that CEO Virginia Rometty is hoping to meet with an aggressive product roadmap that focuses equally on homegrown innovation and strategic acquisitions such as SoftLayer, which took center stage at the conference. Appearing on theCUBE's opening segment alongside co-host and Wikibon chief analyst Dave Vellante, Furrier hailed the deal as a key enabler in the vendor's efforts to blur the lines between public and private cloud computing with value-added services. Middleware services . "This next chapter of innovation is around really delivering value, and that's around cloud equals growth for not only the companies selling the hardware and software but also the customers," Furrier remarks. "SoftLayer is going to come into its own as a key part of the strategy, but not just SoftLayer, it's going to be IBM retooling around SoftLayer providing the middleware, new software architectures -- open frameworks, the modern operating system, modern infrastructure." Big Blue confirmed its commitment to these trends with the recent integration of its Power Systems into the SoftLayer infrastructure-as-a-service platform. In conjunction, the vendor became a founding member of the newly established Cloud Foundry Foundation, which will focus on driving the adoption of the open source platform among developers. The latter announcement is especially significant because, as Vellante notes, "you gotta have the developer, the eyes and ears, in order to win in the cloud game."