Today’s topics include a look at what a recent Supreme Court ruling means to online retailers, and IBM bringing its Cloud Private platform to its Cloud Managed Services offering.
The U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision last week on the South Dakota v. Wayfair case that states may charge tax on purchases made from out-of-state sellers, even if the seller does not have a physical presence in the taxing state.
In this new ruling, the court held that a previous decision, which asserted that states could only collect sales taxes from businesses that had a physical presence in the state, had created an unfair distinction between sellers that were in-state and those that weren’t, and that sales taxes should apply to sellers that have a significant quantity of business in a state, primarily large, national companies.
Paying myriad sales taxes won’t be the biggest burden small web retailers face from the Supreme Court ruling, however. An even bigger problem is that small businesses will have to find a way to affordably handle all the administrative tasks related to tax collection.
IBM announced on June 21 that is it expanding its cloud-native capabilities, enabling the Kubernetes-based IBM Cloud Private platform to run on the company’s Cloud Managed Services offering.
The new capability brings together IBM’s recently launched Cloud Private platform with the managed Cloud Managed Services offering to help enterprises adopt container-based, cloud-native application models.
According to Michael Elder, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Master Inventor for the IBM Private Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud Private embeds many capabilities to support the adoption and operation of Kubernetes in the enterprise, including a built-in Image Registry and Helm Catalog.