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IBM announced that it will soon open a SoftLayer data center in London to serve European customers.
The new data center will be the latest of 15 new data centers that IBM plans to open as part of a $1.2 billion global investment to strengthen and extend its cloud services around the world.
The new facility will provide customers and their end users with SoftLayer services that meet in-country data residency requirements. It will also complement the existing SoftLayer Amsterdam data center and London network Point of Presence (PoP), both launched in 2012, to provide European customers redundancy options within the region.
The London data center will have capacity for more than 15,000 physical servers and will offer the full range of SoftLayer cloud infrastructure services, including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage and networking. It will integrate with all SoftLayer data centers and network PoPs around the world. With these services deployed on demand, and with remote access and control, customers will be enabled to create their ideal cloud environment—whether it be public, private, dedicated or hybrid.
“We already have a large customer base in London and the region; we’re excited to give those customers a full SoftLayer data center right in their backyard, with all the privacy, security, and control the SoftLayer platform offers,” said Lance Crosby, CEO of IBM’s SoftLayer, in a statement. “The work these businesses are doing—the solutions and services that they are building in the cloud—is inspiring. Organizations of all sizes are using SoftLayer services to disrupt their industries or even their own operations, creating new business models and applications.”
One such customer is MobFox, provider of a mobile advertising platform in Europe. “MobFox has been working with SoftLayer for a couple of years,” Julian Zehetmayr, CEO of the company, in a statement. “We currently deliver more than 150 billion impressions per month for clients including Nike, Heineken, EA, eBay, BMW, Netflix, Expedia, and McDonalds. London is a key location for company like ours, operating in digital advertising space and serving global clients.”
IBM said SoftLayer services will benefit businesses based in London and surrounding areas. The region is a key cloud market, with customers using cloud to deploy Web-centric workloads or to transform their existing operations. One third of the world’s largest companies are headquartered in London, and a majority of the world’s largest financial institutions have operations there. Additionally, London has one of the world’s largest communities for technology startups, incubators and entrepreneurs, IBM said.
SoftLayer will begin taking orders for the London data center in July, with a special offer of up to $500 off new orders in the data center for a limited time. More details about the discount can be found here.
IBM Opening New SoftLayer Data Center in London
IBM also announced that French online bank Boursorama, a subsidiary of the Société Générale group, has signed a five-year services agreement with IBM whereby Boursorama will move its Web-based IT to SoftLayer cloud infrastructure.
By deploying its services on SoftLayer, Boursorama will be able to improve management of IT resources by quickly activating servers based on specific client needs and usage. It will also continue to deliver new and innovative offerings at a lower cost thanks to the flexibility brought by the IBM Cloud solution, and will strengthen the security and resilience of its Websites, IBM said.
“We consider quality and availability of the website to be one of the pillars of the development of our company,” said Marie Cheval, CEO of Boursorama, in a statement. “The agreement with IBM will help us implement a proven technology infrastructure that will let us continue to grow while also giving us the opportunity to improve our website’s resilience, our website being our main means of communication with our clients.”
Meanwhile, in a recent study, Synergy Research Group listed IBM among the top three providers in the cloud market for the first quarter of 2014. Synergy also recognized IBM as the leader in hybrid and private cloud engagements with nearly 14 percent of worldwide revenue market shares from the third quarter of 2013 through the first quarter of 2014.
In addition to being ranked with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, IBM ranks second behind Microsoft in terms of year-to-year growth at 80 percent, compared with the same time last year, according to Synergy.
“Synergy Research’s data validates IBM’s ongoing work to deliver cloud services for the enterprise as businesses work to address the need to better manage data for increased insight and efficiency within their industries,” said James Comfort, IBM’s general manager of cloud services, in a statement. “As one of the top three overall cloud providers and the clear-cut leader in providing hybrid and private cloud services, this report validates our long-term cloud strategy.”
In May, market research firm IDC ranked IBM as the top cloud computing provider to businesses. An IDC survey showed that when it comes to infrastructure as a service (IaaS), businesses ranked IBM as the No. 1 provider—beating out competitors such as Cisco, Amazon and Google. Enterprises ranked Cisco as second, HP third and AT&T fourth, according to IDC. Google came in fifth, Microsoft sixth and Amazon seventh.
The rankings were based on responses from more than 400 U.S.-based companies with more than 1,000 employees. The survey results were based on customer ratings, rather than the number of users or sales.
According to the study, buyers selected IBM as their top overall preference among providers they believe can most effectively provide IaaS, whether private or public. IBM was the leading cloud vendor with 35 percent of first-place votes. By comparison, Amazon carried 13 percent, Microsoft and Google came in around 16 percent.