There’s something of a theme among large vendor: a big grandiose announcement of massive investment in a particular space. All too often however the announcement isn’t actually followed by anything substantive. It’s the reason why infrastructure vendors like
Google
and AWS have lots of credibility – they spend billions of dollars every quarter on capital investment but don’t make a big fuss about it.
When
IBM
announced a $1.2B investment globally to extend its SoftLayer footprint, many commentators expected it was one of these meaningless announcements that would amount to little. Which is why the announcement that SoftLayer is opening a full SoftLayer data center in London this month is actually pretty important. It’s also important because IBM, an unashamedly enterprise-focused company, certainly needs to deliver something to European companies who are very worried about the location of their data given the Edward Snowden revelations. True SoftLayer has a data center in Amsterdam, and did have a small-scale presence in London, but this announcement is the real deal, a full scale SoftLayer data center. London is an important location for this roll out since fully one third of the world’s biggest companies are headquartered in the city. Not having a full presence was something of a glaring omission.
In terms of capacity, the London facility will have room for over 1500 physical servers and will offer the full SoftLayer portfolio: bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage and networking. As expected it will be connected via a private network to all the other SoftLayer facilities globally.
Of course the biggest cloud competitors to SoftLayer already have a UK presence, as such IBM isn’t being a leader with this move but rather following in the footsteps of AWS,
Microsoft
, Rackspace et al. But as I’ve said on numerous occasions before, the typical IBM customer is different from the typical customer of most other vendors – IBM tends more towards larger enterprises who see value in IBM’s long history and existing relationships. That might be a perception that has little validity in the reality of the situation but often enterprises make their buying decisions for unusual reasons. For those customers this news will be welcome.
