IBM has acquires a cloud computing company SoftLayer Technologies Inc. to expand its online software business.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the Wall Street Journal reported that it is worth an estimated $2 billion, according to a person “familiar with the matter.”
“As businesses add public cloud capabilities to their on-premise IT systems, they need enterprise-grade reliability, security and management,” Erich Clementi, senior vice president of IBM Global Technology Services, said in a statement. “With SoftLayer, IBM will accelerate the build-out of our public cloud infrastructure to give clients the broadest choice of cloud offerings to drive business innovation.”
“SoftLayer has a strong track record with born-on-the-cloud companies, and our move today with IBM will rapidly expand that footprint globally as well as allow us to go deep into the large enterprise market,” Lance Crosby, SoftLayer CEO, said in a statement. “The compelling opportunity is connecting IBM’s geographic reach, industry expertise and IBM’s SmartCloud breadth with our innovative technology.”
SoftLayer Technologies was founded in 2005. It claims to be the world’s largest privately-held cloud services firm. The company specializes in public clouds, managing data storage and software for businesses remotely.SoftLayer serves about 21,000 customers and has 13 data centers throughout the U.S., Asia and Europe.
