IBM's billion-plus investment includes data centres in North Asia, India

IBM plans to commit over US$1.2 billion to significantly expand its global cloud footprint, including through a network of data centers designed to bring clients greater flexibility, transparency and control over how they manage their data, run their businesses and deploy their IT operations in the cloud.
 
The new cloud investments IBM is making will provide business clients the ability to place and control their data globally. A combination of distributed local data centres and a global network allows clients to place data where it is required, when it is required as well as the ability to consolidate or aggregate data as needed. This provides optimised application performance and responsiveness. 

With this announcement, IBM plans to have data centres in all major geographies and financial centres with plans to expand in the Middle East and Africa in 2015.
This year, IBM plans to deliver cloud services from 40 data centres worldwide in 15 countries and five continents, namely North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. 

IBM will add to the existing global footprint of 13 global data centres from SoftLayer and 12 from IBM with 15 new centres worldwide. In Asia, the newest data centres to launch are in China, Hong Kong, Japan, and India. 

By some estimates, the global cloud market is set to grow to US$200 billion by 2020*, driven largely by businesses and government agencies deploying cloud services to market, sell, develop products, manage their supply chain and transform their business practices.

"IBM is continuing to invest in high growth areas," said Erich Clementi, Senior Vice President, IBM Global Technology Services. "Last year, IBM made a big investment adding the US$2 billion acquisition of SoftLayer to its existing high value cloud portfolio. Today's announcement is another major step in driving a global expansion of IBM's cloud footprint and helping clients drive transformation." 

Cloudant CEO Derek Schoettle welcomed the move. “Our mission is to be the standard data layer for Web and mobile applications. That mission requires us to push application data to the network edge, in as many locations as possible," he explained. 

"Expanding beyond IBM SoftLayer’s current footprint presents significant value to our business. The investment IBM is making to expand their global footprint will not only help fuel our growth, but the growth of thousands of Cloudant users worldwide as well.”

IBM SoftLayer's network architecture allows clients to optimise global performance using a private network and not be subject to the uncontrolled nature of the public networks and the internet. 

Since 2007, IBM has invested more than US$7 billion in 15 acquisitions to accelerate its cloud initiatives and build a high value cloud portfolio. The company plans to establish SoftLayer, acquired in 2013, as the foundation of its cloud portfolio. Since its acquisition, IBM SoftLayer has served nearly 2,400 new cloud clients. 

Last week, IBM established the IBM Watson Group, a new business unit dedicated to the development and commercialisation of cloud-delivered cognitive and Big Data innovations. As part of this initiative, IBM will also deploy Watson on SoftLayer. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/cloud. 

"Cloud represents a growing area for venture capitalist investment," said Ann Winblad, Co-founder and Managing Director of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. "By investing in the cloud ecosystem, IBM not only makes it easier for enterprises to adopt cloud and drive innovation, but also helps new companies of all sizes get off the ground more quickly." 

*IBM market intelligence