IBM opens first Cloud Centre in Mexico

As part of its $1.2 billion investment to expand its cloud services, IBM has announced the opening of its first cloud center in Mexico. Located in Querétaro, near Mexico City, the new facility strengthens IBM Cloud’s presence in Latin America by offering data residency within the region, even more redundancy in the Americas, and the complete SoftLayer platform, enabling customers to create their ideal fully integrated, scalable cloud computing environment in Mexico.

The new facility further extends IBM’s global cloud footprint, which includes new cloud centers recently launched in Frankfurt, Tokyo, Paris, Melbourne, Toronto, London, Texas, Virginia, Hong Kong, and more, all of which opened in the last year. With industry experts predicting that Latin America will see more than 25 percent growth in the cloud-computing business within the next three years, the Mexico cloud center gives IBM a powerful anchor in the local cloud market.

The Mexico City facility will support the region’s growth by providing a local cloud center in which to keep location-sensitive data and workloads closer to Mexican and Latin American customers and end users. It also broadens data redundancy options within the Americas by enabling backups that can be replicated and seamlessly integrated in any of IBM’s SoftLayer cloud centers via SoftLayer’s leading private network, with free unmetered bandwidth between locations.

“The new cloud center in Mexico reinforces our commitment to the growing Mexican and Latin American cloud markets,” said Lance Crosby, GM of cloud innovation and business development for IBM. “We can now bring all the benefits and advantages of SoftLayer’s cloud platform to customers in country or to customers looking for a Mexican location.”

Through SoftLayer’s unique global network, differentiated by its network-within-a-network architecture, the Mexico City facility provides 10Gbps connections to SoftLayer services, less than 25 milliseconds of latency from IBM’s Dallas cloud center, and less than 210 milliseconds of latency from IBM’s growing network of SoftLayer cloud centers around the world.

“The Mexico cloud center brings IBM Cloud’s complete portfolio to the doorsteps of local customers, who can run workloads and applications in the cloud while taking advantage of in-country data and compute services, security, high-speed connections, and 24/7 support,” said Salvador Martinez Vidal, general manager of IBM Mexico. “We look forward to offering customers our global IBM capabilities from a local Mexico address.”

The Mexico City cloud center follows SoftLayer’s standardized pod design, having the capacity for thousands of physical servers and offering the full range of SoftLayer cloud infrastructure services, including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage, security services, and networking.

With services deployed on demand and full remote access and control via a customer Web portal or API, customers can create their ideal public, private, or hybrid cloud environments. The Mexico City cloud center gives IBM Cloud enterprise customers, SMBs, and startups a local Mexico facility to accelerate their business growth through SoftLayer’s high-value infrastructure, available via online orders with payment-on-demand.