IBM’s SoftLayer Announces Price Cuts
According to a press release dated June 10th 2014, SoftLayer has decided to cut prices “Across all service families.” New and existing customers of SoftLayer will receive a 5% savings when they purchase virtual cloud servers. Object storage prices were slashed an astounding 60%. With PR buzz surrounding IBM and its cloud services, you would think that the lower SoftLayer prices would be worthy of being a top headline in the world of Big Blue.
Many analysts feel as if IBM is trying to differentiate itself based on platform and services offered versus the big three in Cloud. For example, Microsoft, Amazon and Google do not currently offer bare metal servers to their clients through the same portal in which they sell their cloud offerings. SoftLayer also has BlueMix, which is a popular platform for developers to quickly build applications for the cloud that can be deployed to anyone in the world.
Francisco Romero, COO at SoftLayer is quoted in the press release as saying, “We have always committed to providing customers the most performance per dollar and the clearest picture of their total cost of cloud.”
Is SoftLayer Trying to Compete with Cloud’s Big Three on Price?
According to Romero, the answer is no. “We don’t believe in price wars, because the cloud is not a commodity. There is a significant difference between what you get from one provider to the next.” Romero continues by saying, “We see it every day. Other providers might have lower starting prices, but then the customer has to pay an additional fee for bandwidth, storage, support, and they tend to be based on an oversubscribed or over segmented infrastructure model. In the end the total bill comes out much higher. Their customers end up paying far more than they would at SoftLayer to get a fraction of the performance, reliability, and capacity that their workload demands.”
