BlueMix Goes Live; SoftLayer to Open London Datacenter
SoftLayer, IBM’s public cloud offering, is expected to bring its new London, England datacenter online with the prospects of providing more services to businesses within the United Kingdom. IBM has also announced that BlueMix, the popular PaaS offering from IBM that was built on Cloud Foundry, has left the beta stage and is now ready for general production use.
The news of the London datacenter’s opening is only the first of many datacenters being built out by IBM that are expected to open by the end of 2014. SoftLayer is currently building out datacenters in Paris, France and Frankfurt, Germany to better accommodate the goals of European and international businesses.
Steven Canale, VP at SoftLayer said, “London has the headquarters of about a third of the biggest companies around the world, so it is obviously very fertile ground for many enterprise businesses, but this is part of our overall $1.2bn expansion, so we’re not just building out here in London, it’s around the globe.”
At the end of 2014, analysts suggest that SoftLayer will have 40 datacenters all around the globe which will span across 15 countries. In regards to IBM’s service level agreements, Canale went on to say, “The concept is to have a data centre that is 40ms or less [in latency] away from any customer in the world.”
With the new SoftLayer datacenters being placed strategically around the globe, it seems as if IBM will be able to reach its 40ms ping goals. IBM cloud leader Doug Clark talked about the benefits of SoftLayer’s presence in the United Kingdom. Clark mentions, “The enterprises that are really getting cloud computing, the ones that are leading the pace, they are seeing twice the revenue performance compared to the rest of the pack, so they are disappearing off into the sunset. They’re getting a competitive advantage and they are reducing TCO from it.”
