IBM Spending $1.2 Billion to Setup 15 Datacenters Across 8 Countries
After seeing its competitors surge past in the cloud competing space over the past year, IBM has decided to open up its purse strings in order to expand its presence in the cloud computing space across various geographies.
Last week, the firm announced that it is raking in close to $1.2 billion this year, in order to build out close to 15 additional data centres spread across 8 countries in order to augment its cloud offerings in these markets. The choice of the cities, in which these new data centres will come up, is also insightful. Two new data centres are expected to come up in U.S (Washington DC & Dallas) and is indicative of the huge push that the company is set to give to its cloud based services in its largest market. The other countries in which these data centres will be set up are “China, U.K , Japan, India and Canada”. These are the other major markets in which IBM has been pushing hard to protect its traditional market share (Europe, Canada, Japan) and grow its business in the fast growing emerging markets (China & India). IBM has also indicated its growth plan for 2015 and hopes to push into the oil rich Middle East and unexplored markets of Africa in 2015.
$200 Billion Market Potential
Once these new investments into data centres are operational, the firm will boast of a total of 40 data centres across U.S and will double its current data centre count. IBM had last year entered the cloud computing space by buying out cloud services provider SoftLayer for $2 billion. These investments have been made by IBM in order to gain a big market share of the internally estimated $200 billion global cloud market (by 2020).