Building on its $2 billion acquisition of SoftLayer, IBM has announced a series of new hard- en software offerings that fuse together high value cloud and analytics capabilities. The hosting infrastructure of SoftLayer is at the core of these offerings, says IBM.
Since its recent acquisition, SoftLayer has added 1,600 new clients to IBM’s existing roster of 21,000 clients in 140 countries. Quite an addition indeed to IBM´s existing client portfolio, but what´s more important, IBM now officially states that the SoftLayer hosting infrastructure will be at the core of the company’s cloud portfolio and its new cloud and SaaS product offerings.
As part of its cloud related product expansion, IBM is now announcing new social business and mobile offerings for its 100+ software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution portfolio, integrated cloud capabilities with SoftLayer assets, for hybrid cloud computing environments.
SoftLayer Infrastructure
IBM is now clearly beginning to shift its cloud portfolio to the SoftLayer infrastructure. One of the first shifts, among many of these shifts includes the IBM Social Learning platform, a first of its kind social enablement platform that is part of its Smarter Workforce portfolio and is already in use under the name OpenPediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital with 420 hospitals in 78 countries on six continents.
Big Blue is announcing that is it commercializing the IBM Social Learning platform on SoftLayer technology to apply it across a variety of industries, such as retail, energy and utilities, government, healthcare and automotive. Now this unique combination of SoftLayer assets and IBM’s cloud capabilities, built on open standards, is able to offer organizations the ability to share knowledge and expertise through real-time videos via a hybrid cloud computing environment.
For example, doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital can share training videos with clinicians halfway across the globe to demonstrate the latest life-saving techniques in child care. Planned to be available in December 2013, this new platform will be delivered as-a-service to clients.
NEW: PureSystems, Power Systems and System x
Additionally, IBM’s recent acquisition of Xtify, a leading provider of cloud-based mobile messaging tools that help organizations improve mobile sales, drive in-store traffic and engage customers with personalized offers, will also run on SoftLayer technology in the future.
At the same time, IBM has unveiled new systems and solutions that will help managed hosting providers build their own private and hybrid clouds. These include PureSystems, Power Systems, Smarter Storage Systems, System x, and Technical Computing offerings that provide the flexibility clients need to quickly deploy clouds.
