IBM SoftLayer

IBM is two years into its SoftLayer acquisition, which has  transformed and helped form the backbone of its cloud offerings.

The SoftLayer acquisition is really exciting and transformational for IBM, and I think it provides a tremendous amount of value for our customers small and large.

Increasingly what we find is that customers want to put high performance workloads on the cloud. For example, they might be doing big data analysis or they might have mobile applications or social applications that they want to stand up on cloud.

What SoftLayer provides you is a full expanse of cloud capabilities so you can have what are known as bare metal dedicated servers which are ideal for IO-intensive workload applications. They don’t have virtualization so they can scale vertically, which is very important when you're doing big data analysis.

Then they have virtualized servers the way you would expect from many of the other providers out there. And they also have the ability to deliver this on a set of network options. So if you want a private cloud you can stand that up on SoftLayer. If you want public cloud, you can stand that up on SoftLayer. And, they give you a very high performance network as well.

So it’s the servers. It’s the security. It’s the other capabilities including firewalls, security devices, etc. It’s a high performance network. All of those are capabilities that SoftLayer delivers for IBM acquisition.