IBM is beta testing a public cloud, based on customizable virtual machines, for application software development.

It’s called plainly enough IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud and will provide compute and storage as a service with Rational Software Delivery Services, WebSphere middleware and Information Management database thrown in.

The Rational widgetry include a complementary set of ready-to-use application lifecycle management tools.

IBM also said pre-configured integrations of some of these Rational services are available based on the Jazz framework, which dynamically integrates and synchronizes people, processes and assets associated with software development projects.

The services will support development across heterogeneous environments, including Java, open source and .NET.

It’s advertised as cutting out the time it takes to provision a test environment from weeks to hours, and in some cases even minutes.

Big Blue is really trolling for large enterprises to use it. So it’s also got a private cloud version of the Rational Software Delivery Services for enterprise customers who “prefer governance and control of their own cloud environment.”

The Rational Software Delivery Services for Cloud Computing includes a set of best practices to achieve agility; integrated services for test management, test planning and test lab management; and tools to help develop for the cloud.