SoftLayer CEO talks IBM’s cloud pitch, AWS competition

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Beth Pariseau.

Lance Crosby is the CEO and founder of SoftLayer, a company IBM purchased in 2013 to boost its cloud computing credibility among enterprise customers. Modern Infrastructure caught up with him this spring to suss out SoftLayer’s progress at IBM.

Modern Infrastructure: What’s IBM’s cloud pitch to enterprises?

Crosby: Everything we do can be either single-tenant or multi-tenant, and we give complete control and transparency, which is unlike all the other clouds. Our background is in enterprise and government hosting. The look and feel of SoftLayer is a lot more familiar to enterprise customers than other clouds, which is why IBM was drawn to SoftLayer at the time of the acquisition…


Because we’re the foundation for the entire cloud portfolio, those attributes available at the infrastructure level can be inherited at the PaaS and SaaS levels as well. It gives each one of those teams the ability to decide what they want the end product to look like. What we’ve found is, most enterprises and most governments like that for both compliance and security reasons, and just because they’ve always typically driven their own infrastructure.

People ask, "How are you like Amazon?" [Our] service is consumable, frictionless and API-driven, and by the month, by the hour, by the seat, but that’s about as far as it goes. Once you get past that, we’re just a whole lot more enterprise-y, for lack of a better term, than competitors are…

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