IBM has announced plans to commit over $1.2 billion to significantly expand its global cloud footprint with additional centers planned for the Middle East region by 2015.
By some estimates, the global cloud market is set to grow to $200 billion by 2020; driven largely by businesses and government agencies deploying cloud services to develop products, market, and manage their supply chains in transforming their business practices.
\IBM’s latest investment includes a network of cloud centers designed to bring organizations greater flexibility, transparency and control over how they manage their data, run their business and deploy their IT operations.
This year IBM plans to deliver cloud services from 40 data centers worldwide in 15 countries and five continents globally. IBM will open 15 new centers worldwide adding to the existing global footprint of 13 global data centers from SoftLayer and 12 from IBM. Among the newest data centers to launch are China, Washington D.C., Hong Kong, London, and India.
With this announcement, IBM also plans to have data centers in all major geographies and financial centers with plans to expand in the Middle East and Africa in 2015.
“IBM is continuing to invest in high growth areas,” said Erich Clementi, senior vice president of IBM Global Technology Services. “Last year, IBM made a big investment adding the $2 billion acquisition of SoftLayer to its existing high value cloud portfolio. Today’s announcement is another major step in driving a global expansion of IBM’s cloud footprint and helping clients drive transformation.”
IBM’s latest investment announcement comes on the heels of another high-profile investment revealed earlier this month to invest more than $1 billion behind establishing the IBM Watson Group. The new business unit is dedicated to the development and commercialization of cloud-delivered cognitive innovations. The move signifies a strategic shift by IBM to accelerate into the marketplace a new class of software, services and apps that think, improve by learning, and discover answers and insights to complex questions from massive amounts of Big Data.
