How IBM Is Retooling Itself for Future Cloud Business
March 30, 2014
Grazed from eWeek. Author: Chris Preimesberger.
When IBM realized it needed to go outside to acquire a cloud services-provisioning company a couple of years ago and eventually settled in June 2013 on a lesser-known outfit in Dallas called SoftLayer, the move surprised some IT industry watchers. After all, multinational IBM was investing a reported $2 billion into a smaller cloud-services provider—whose 28,000 customers, using about 90,000 servers, were mostly midsize companies.
On the surface, this didn’t sound like a natural fit into IBM’s big-picture enterprise strategy. Did a player such as SoftLayer have the IP, the engineering and the management wherewithal to scale up to the numerous deployments IBM was going to need?…
This move was not unlike a major league baseball club bringing up a young, unknown pitcher from the rookie league and starting him in Game 7 of the World Series. But nearly a year after the acquisition, it’s been "so far, so good," because IBM is making inroads in selling to the midmarket—which will continue to be the fastest-growing segment of the IT market for years to come…
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