The move by IBM, a bellwether for the IT industry because of its global span and breadth of businesses, is aimed at grabbing market share from companies like Amazon.com Inc and Salesforce.com Inc, which have been successful in the mid-market, the paper said.

For Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM, midsize companies refer to those with less than 1,000 employees, the newspaper said.

The company's general manager in charge of small and medium-sized businesses, Andy Monshaw, told the Journal that the cheaper cost of cloud computing will let the company reach a bigger base of smaller customers.

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing and storage capacity that allows users to, for instance, rent servers and software to store data over a network.

IBM officials could not be reached for comment outside regular U.S. business hours.

(Reporting by Balaji Sridharan in Bangalore; Editing by Matt Driskill)

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