IBM reported its quarterly earnings this week and, while the company’s overall results were once again disappointing, cloud revenue was up 15 percent year-over-year and accounted for $3.9 billion in revenue. It’s no surprise, then, that IBM is doubling down on its cloud strategy; to keep its momentum going, the company today announced the launch of four new data centers for its customers.
These new data centers are located in London, where the company is opening two data centers at the same time, Sydney and San Jose. This brings IBM’s overall data center footprint to 60 across 19 countries. With today’s launches, this includes five in England, four in Australia and 23 in the United States.
The company notes that it’s the only cloud provider in Australia to offer a full set of IRAP-certified solutions for bare metal, private and public cloud services (IRAP is the country’s certification for cloud services providers that want to work with the Australian government). It’s worth noting, though, that AWS, Microsoft and a number of other vendors also offer a number of services that have been IRAP-certified.
While IBM’s announcement doesn’t specifically plug the Watson brand, the company notes that these new locations will allow its customers in those regions to get low-latency access to its cognitive services, as well as its blockchain, big data and IoT offerings.