IBM Buys Dallas Based Softlayer For $2 Billion 78
An anonymous reader writes "IBM this morning announced a deal to acquire the Dallas based hosting company Softlayer, the largest privately held cloud computing provider in the world. Formerly known as The Planet, they have a dark past and hopefully a bright future. Interesting that ISS and Softlayer will now be under the same roof. 'IBM will integrate SoftLayer’s public-cloud services with its own IBM SmartCloud portfolio. In theory, that will allow IBM to more speedily deliver a combination of private, public and hybridized cloud platforms to business clients. CloudLayer features include the ability to deploy virtual cloud servers (with processors 2.0GHz or faster), a content-delivery network with scalability and security, an object-storage platform based on OpenStack Object Storage, and private-cloud solutions.'"
Re:$2 Billion (Score:5, Informative)
Considering that IBM is actually getting datacenters+software+customers+sales people+support organization, this is a much better deal than, say, Instagram or many of the other recent "Cloud" deals. This is an actual cloud provider, with actual hardware and sales. Looks like Big Blue is getting serious about switching to being a service provider instead of a hardware provider.
Re:$2 Billion (Score:4, Informative)
The cloud bubble can't get much bigger than this. Can it?
they have assets and real paying customers..
they have 81 thousand servers (per wikipedia, probably a different amount now) so really it's not that bad price.
the pricing is much more sensible than any 1b+ deal I've heard of in several years.
Re:$2 Billion (Score:2, Informative)