IBM opened four new U.S. cloud data centers as of last week and will open four additional data centers before the end of second quarter. The four soon-to-be-built facilities include two in London, one in Australia, and one in San Jose, California, according to Francisco Romero, IBM’s VP of cloud infrastructure operations.
The facilities are part of IBM’s plan to expand its global cloud presence and provide enterprise companies with access to services including Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, quantum computing, and cognitive.
The four new U.S. IBM Cloud data centers, two in Dallas, Texas and two in Washington, D.C., bring IBM’s global data center count to 55. Of those, 22 are located in the U.S.
The new facilities are part of IBM’s “major investments to expand our global cloud data centers in 2017,” said John Considine, IBM’s general manager for cloud infrastructure in a statement.
Romero wouldn’t say how much the company plans to spend on new data centers this year. “We’re not disclosing the investment amount of this initiative in isolation from everything else that is going on with IBM Cloud,” he said. The new data centers, he added, “are part of the broader IBM Cloud investment.”
It’s an investment that seems to be paying dividends for the tech giant.
While the company’s legacy business revenue continues to drop, IBM’s cloud offerings revenue was up 35 percent in the first quarter of this year, led by cloud as a service, which was up more than 60 percent, according to the company’s quarterly earnings.
“With over $14.5 billion in cloud revenue over the last 12 months, we’re the global leader in enterprise cloud,” said Martin Schroeter, IBM’s senior VP and CFO, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript of the earnings call.
“We’re moving away from a customer, on-premise type cloud deployment and really doubling down on the hybrid approach,” Romero said.
IBM’s focus on enterprise customers, and supporting their legacy systems while helping them migrate to the IBM Cloud, sets it apart from other public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, Romero added. This spans from Infrastructure-as-a-Service to Watson and other cognitive cloud services.
“If you look at the breadth and depth of portfolio around cloud services, from infrastructure services, developer services, analytics, cognitive services, the experience that IBM brings to the client as an integrated value proposition is bar none. It really reinforces IBM’s commitment to demonstrate that it’s all in, in the cloud, and continues to make investments to evolve the platform.”