IBM has announced the intent to acquire SoftLayer, a leading provider of cloud computing infrastructure—including dedicated servers, managed hosting and infrastructure as a service (IaaS)—headquartered in Dallas, Texas, with data centers and network points of presence in the United States, Asia and Europe. SoftLayer has built a unified platform with an innovative high-performance architecture and global private network, serving approximately 21,000 customers across 140 countries. Their single-pane web portal provides the ability to securely mix and match shared and dedicated (public and private) cloud services with broad-based configuration and mass customization options and control.
Together, IBM and SoftLayer will extend and expand the IBM SmartCloud Services portfolio, offering customers worldwide, spanning SMB to enterprise and partners, a robust and comprehensive cloud portfolio – OpenStack compliant, yet maintaining existing interfaces, consistent with the IBM SmartCloud strategy and historic commitment to open standards.Combined offerings will offer a continuum of options across architectures, deployment models and price points—all delivered on a global scale and complemented with technical, business process and industry experience from IBM and our combined ecosystem community. As well, IBM and SoftLayer intend to build a set of next-generation infrastructure platforms that hide the complexity of cloud, freeing customers to focus on business goals and using the transformational power of cloud to help achieve and surpass them.
Source: http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/us/en/softlayer.html