IBM Announces a Major Investment in Cloud Computing

IBM spent heavily on cloud infrastructure in 2014, building on its acquisition of SoftLayer and expanding data centers around the world. The strategy was aimed particularly at enterprise customers that wanted cloud flexibility without abandoning existing corporate systems.

SoftLayer differed from many early cloud platforms by offering both virtual machines and bare-metal servers through a common management system. Bare metal gave customers direct access to physical hardware for workloads that did not fit well inside a hypervisor, while API-driven provisioning kept some of the automation benefits of cloud computing.

IBM’s approach reflected the rise of hybrid cloud. Large organizations were rarely going to move every database and mainframe workload to one public cloud at once; they needed networking, identity, and management that could span old and new environments.