IBM announced its plans of investing a whopping $1.2 billion (£730 million) to boost and expand its cloud footprint in the international market through a number of new data centres all across the globe.
The computer giant announced that it will end this year probably with 40 data centres across 13 countries spread in five different continents. The company is going to open up 15 new “cloud centres” in London, Washington D.C., Hong Kong, Toronto, Japan, India, China, Canada, Mexico and Dallas.
IBM said that through this cloud centre expansion plan, the company will ensure that it has at least four data centres in what it considers major geographies – Europe, Latin America, Asia and the Americas. The company is also keen to expand and boost its presence into the Middle East and Africa by 2015.
IBM believes that the global cloud market will grow to $200 billion by 2020, so to deal with the continued rise in demand for cloud computing, the company plans to integrate the recently-acquired SoftLayer’s cloud platform into its wider cloud portfolio, thereby doubling the amount of cloud capacity available on SoftLayer. Lance Crosby will continue heading IBM’s cloud unit.
Senior vice president of IBM Global Technology Services, Erich Clementi, said that “IBM is continuing to invest in high growth areas” notes TechWorld.
“IBM recognises the universal need to deliver mission-critical workloads in a cloud environment that are secure, reliable and built on open standards as contrasted with the commoditised cloud model that emphasizes low costs, instead of business growth and innovation”, added Clementi.
