IBM expands global Cloud footprint

IBM will open a new SoftLayer cloud center in Paris, France, before the end of this year. The facility will complement SoftLayer cloud centers in London and Amsterdam, offering clients more options for moving data and operations to the cloud in Europe in a secure environment. IBM Cloud will also provide cloud infrastructure services for customers and companies in France that require in-country data residency.

“We’re addressing clients’ and countries’ growing desire for data sovereignty head on,” said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer. “With each new cloud center we’re bringing our complete cloud services portfolio to the doorsteps of local customers. The Paris cloud center allows us to support workloads and applications from French customers who want their data to stay in the country and secure in the cloud, and provides our global clients with an opportunity to get even closer to their end user customers in the region.”

The facility is part of a new 15 cloud center expansion and a $1.2 billion investment by IBM Cloud to grow its cloud presence around the world. It has capacity for thousands of physical servers and offers the full range of SoftLayer cloud infrastructure services, including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage, and networking. It seamlessly integrates via the company’s leading private network with all SoftLayer cloud centers and network PoPs around the world. With services deployed on demand and full remote access and control, customers can create their ideal public, private, or hybrid cloud environments.

The new Paris cloud center opening comes at an opportune time as French analyst firm Markess recently reported that the cloud computing market in France has increased by €2.2 billion in 2012 to €4.1 billion in 2014 as more companies adopt cloud to deploy Web-centric workloads or transform their existing operations.
“We’ve been a SoftLayer customer for four years now,” said Nicolas Zumbiehl, CEO of Hypernia Corporation, a SoftLayer customer that provides fully managed hosting and gaming services. “We appreciate SoftLayer’s robust cloud environment and worldwide network, and since we’re a global company with clients in France, we’re excited about SoftLayer’s global expansion, and especially about the new data center in France.”

France consistently ranks in SoftLayer’s top 10 best-performing countries within EMEA and continues to grow as new French customers come on board.

“We chose SoftLayer because it could deliver the infrastructure we needed to enable our customers with training, localization, and real-time performance support,” said Michel Balcaen, CEO of Assima PLC, a global company with French founders that develops end-user performance software for large organizations around the world. “IBM provided us with the expertise to design our cloud solution, while SoftLayer met all the requirements we had in terms of location, data privacy, flexibility, and performance. We manage centrally the virtual machines for all our clients worldwide from our R&D Center in Paris.”