The new locations include centres set up through a strategic partnership with Equinix. The agreement with Equinix provides direct access to the full portfolio of SoftLayer cloud services via the Equinix Cloud Exchange™ in nine markets worldwide spanning the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific, including Amsterdam, Dallas, Chicago, Paris, Silicon Valley, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Washington, DC.
Through this partnership, SoftLayer provides customers with the ability to easily move production workloads in and out of the cloud, as required in a hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Enterprise cloud deployments, specifically hybrid cloud, are growing at a significant rate. According to Gartner, nearly half of all enterprises will have a hybrid cloud deployed by 2017. Chief among the driving forces behind the adoption of cloud computing worldwide including hybrid cloud are requirements for businesses and governments to store certain data locally to comply with data residency regulations, as well as a growing desire for startups to expand their businesses globally. IBM estimates about 100 nations and territories have adopted laws that dictate how governments and private enterprises handle personal data.
The new centres further expand IBM's global cloud footprint which now includes facilities in Mumbai, London, Amsterdam, Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore, Melbourne, Toronto, Dallas and Raleigh, North Carolina.
Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the new facilities offer an array of solutions including proven cloud resiliency services. These services guarantee customers up times of 99.99% across any IT environment, including traditional IT, public, private, or hybrid cloud deployments. In the event of an outage, the centres' support team can recover data in minutes to ensure that is has little to no impact on business operations while going virtually unseen by customers.
Clients around the world are using IBM cloud centres spread across every major market to help them adopt cloud for growth and innovation. Since the start of November, IBM has announced more than US$4 billion worth of cloud agreements with major enterprises around the world including Lufthansa in Germany, ABN AMRO in the Netherlands, WPP in the UK, Woox Innovations in Hong Kong, Dow Water and Thomson Reuters.
In addition, born-on-the-web innovators are increasingly choosing to build their business on the IBM Cloud. Last month, IBM announced wins with Hancom in Korea among other wins around the world.
"IBM recognises that businesses and governments need the cloud to help them innovate, grow and operate more efficiently in concert with their existing IT investments," said Jim Comfort, General Manager, IBM Cloud Services. "Everything IBM does is designed to help companies transition to the cloud in a responsible way at a pace that best fits their business model and industry. Just as we helped major organisations transform in each preceding era of IT, IBM now serves as the cloud platform for the enterprise."
IBM has announced key cloud investments throughout 2014. In addition to expanding its global cloud footprint and the establishment of the Bluemix PaaS to bring enterprise developers into the hybrid cloud era, IBM also launched a new Cloud marketplace that brings together IBM's vast portfolio of cloud capabilities and new third-party services in a way that delivers a simple and easy experience for the enterprise. The IBM Cloud marketplace serves as a single online destination serves as the digital front door to cloud innovation bringing together IBM's capabilities-as-a-service and those of partners and third party vendors with the security and resiliency enterprises expect.
The announcement with Equinix further extends the reach IBM has achieved through its own cloud portfolio and well as a string of recent cloud partnerships with other notable companies including:
SAP, which selected IBM as a premier strategic provider of cloud infrastructure services for its business critical applications to accelerate customers' ability to run core business in the cloud. SAP applications are now available through IBM's cloud and enables SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud to penetrate major markets with the addition of the IBM cloud data centres.
IBM and Microsoft are working together to provide their respective enterprise software on Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud. This relationship will give clients, partners and developers more choice in the cloud, helping them drive new business opportunities, spur innovation and reduce costs.
IBM and Tencent Cloud recently signed a business cooperation memorandum to collaborate on providing public cloud with software-as-a-service solutions for industries. The companies will focus on emerging small and medium enterprises in the smarter cities, healthcare industries and other fields to enable these industries to utilise mobile, cloud computing and big data tools to transform internal processes and operations, thus achieving cloud transformation in the era of mobility.
AT&T and IBM are collaborating to speed business adoption of cloud services by extending AT&T NetBondSM services to the SoftLayer platform for stronger security and performance. This extension of the IBM and AT&T alliance will allow businesses to easily create hybrid-computing solutions.
IBM and Intel worked together to make SoftLayer the first cloud platform to offer its customers bare metal servers powered by Intel Cloud Technology, which provides monitoring and security down to the microchip level. Through this agreement, the Intel Trusted Execution Technology provides hardware monitoring and security controls that help assure businesses that a workload from a known location on SoftLayer infrastructure is running on trusted hardware.
In addition to these partnerships, IBM is also contributing Private Computing services from IBM Cloud OpenStack Services platform to the OpenStack and Cloud Foundry Foundations. The initial usage of these services will offer expanded capabilities to enable automated integration, reduced cycle time and increased quality for software distribution. This will accelerate time to market for all uses of OpenStack based infrastructure.
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