IBM Making Waves in the Clouds
2014 has been a significant year for information technology giant IBM with what seems like at least one press releases every week. This week being no different, IBM has made a few noteworthy announcements that show how IBM certainly has a lot to shout about.
In one release it was announced that IBM has generated $4 Billion in new multi-year enterprise cloud business since November 1st. Which is in line with their October reports that showed IBM’s cloud revenue was up by 50 percent in the first nine months of this year from $4.4 Billion in 2013. In this was of course IBMs recent partnerships with the airline Lufthansa, Dutch bank ABN AMRO, advertising giant WWP, Thomson Reuters, audio electronics maker Woox Innovations, and Dow Walter arm of Dow Chemical. Additionally, IBM has made a number of strategic technology partnership deals with SAP, Microsoft, Tencent, AT&T and Intel thereby offing their customers more flexibility when running on IBM cloud networks.
Moe Abulda, vice president of IBM cloud software product management is quoted as saying that IBM’s cloud business is on track to “easily exceed the $7 billion we projected for 2015.” He explained that IBM’s cloud client base has doubled in the past year to more than 20,000 including not only existing IBM clients migrating to the cloud but “thousands of new customers” including enterprises, born-on-the-Web companies and startups.
Another release announced that, as part of the $1.2 billion infrastructure push IBM initiated at the start of the year, they have added 12 new datacenters to the list of locations SoftLayer services are delivered from. With this is IBM’s newly built cloud centers in Frankfurt, Mexico City and Tokyo. Nine other centers are offered from Equinix data centers as a result of a new partnership between the two companies. IBM SoftLayer is now part of the Equinix Cloud Exchange, which means Equinix clients can provision SoftLayer cloud services via APIs, instead of setting up physical cross-connects. This also gives IBM to Equinix’s datacenters in Australia, France, Japan, Singapore, the Netherlands, and the U.S. boosting IBM’s cloud network to a total of 48 cloud centers. No value was put on the deal
Robert LeBlanc, senior vice president of IBM’s software and cloud solutions group is reported as saying, “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. 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.”
Furthermore, IBM also announced recently a new deal with UK-based bus and trains operator, National Express Group Plc to establish Britain’s first postcode-to-postcode journey planner. Ruth Harrison-Wood, Commercial Director for c2c, National Express’ rail division said, “Our work with IBM provides the foundation for our plans to transform the experience of passengers when they travel with c2c. We knew intelligence could be driven from the high volumes of operational and customer data we generate daily. IBM has helped us get a holistic view of operations that will allow us to improve customer satisfaction in multiple areas, including delivering a first in UK rail with national postcode-to-postcode journey planning.”
