IBM has finalised its deal with SoftLayer, announced last month. This grows IBM’s capability to deliver cloud-based solutions considerably. SoftLayer adds new datacenters, an existing portfolio of customers, and a revenue stream to IBM. IBM will merge the company into its new Cloud Services division.
“Cloud computing provides a profound and transformative change in business and government. With SoftLayer in IBM’s portfolio, it will be easier and faster for organizations to adopt game-changing cloud services.” – James Comfort, General Manager, Cloud Services, IBM.
Founded in 2005, SoftLayer set out to become the defacto platform for the Internet. It espoused automation at a time when it was a new fad. SoftLayer services are provisioned via a web-console, and provide bare-metal and virtualised platforms to customers.
The bare-metal environments have a standardised three network connection policy. One connection faces the public network (and hosts front-end services such as web servers). The second faces the private network and supports connections to backend databases and shared SoftLayer services (DNS, software repositories, etc). The third provides a management link to the server.
Venture capital in the form of GI Partners sunk money into SoftLayer in 2006. They also had holdings in EV1 and The Planet, and merged these Internet service providers with SoftLayer. The value of the sale to IBM is undisclosed, but Forbes believes it is in the order of $2bn. GI Partners look to take a substantial slice of that.