IBM’s Cloudburst: Acquisitions, new DCs pave way to expanding cloud footprint

By Pranjal Kshirsagar IBM looks ready to pull out the arsenal on cloud computing. Making two major announcements yesterday, the company finalised acquisition of Aspera – a privately held company that securely speeds the movement of massive data files around the world and also committed $ 1.2 billion to expanding its cloud footprint globally. [caption id=“attachment_216484” align=“alignleft” width=“640”]  IBM is looking to enter the cloud computing market in a big way. Image courtesy Reuters[/caption] Why Aspera? What made IBM go for Aspera was its patented technology which accelerates the secure transfer of large files or data sets by up to 99.9 percent – potentially reducing a 26 hour transmission of a 24 gigabyte file, sent halfway around the world, down to just 30 seconds. This speed is achieved by Aspera’s patented fasp protocol, which breaks the bottlenecks inherent in broadband networks to deliver high performance, efficiency and security in the most difficult WAN environments. This also gives customers a more efficient way to transport data to and from cloud networks. “This is a strategic move by IBM acknowledging the need of enterprises to move large files quickly, reliably and securely across the Internet. Given the announcement by IBM to invest $1.2 billion into its cloud infrastructure, the playground for Aspera’s services will be larger than ever. We expect IBM to quickly leverage Aspera in a similar manner to the recently acquired SoftLayer assets that form the backbone of its cloud infrastructure,” shares Holger Mueller, Vice President and Principal Analyst of disruptive technology research firm, Constellation Research. As far as the $1.2 billion goes, this investment includes a network of cloud  centers  designed to bring clients flexibility, transparency and control over how they manage their data, run their business and deploy their IT operations locally in the cloud. Yes, India gets its own data centers too. IBM plans to deliver cloud services from 40 data centers worldwide in 15 countries and five continents globally, including North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. IBM will open 15 new centers worldwide adding to the existing global footprint of 13 global data centers from SoftLayer and 12 from IBM. Among the newest data centers to launch are China, Washington, D.C., Hong Kong, London, Japan, India, Canada, Mexico City and Dallas. With this announcement, IBM plans to have data centers in all major geographies and financial centers with plans to expand in the Middle East and Africa in 2015. According to Mueller, the old brick and mortar retailer adage can be applied to cloud data center locations in 2014 and going forward – location matters. In addition to performance and reliability gains, having data centers in different countries can also put data privacy compliance issues to rest. “Many countries have strict requirements in regards of and where local data can be stored. The industry and customers have been largely ignoring this and been looking the other way. The conversation with prospects and customers to get cloud loads gets significantly easier when you have an in-country data center,” explains Mueller. “The recent NSA / PRISM scandal gives a number of new and extra concerns to enterprises about naively using the cloud. Local and national data centers, under local jurisdiction, help to address this concern,” he adds. IBM’s Softlayer deal already bearing fruit IBM’s $2 billion Softlayer acquisition in June 2013 underpins its cloud growth. Since the deal, IBM SoftLayer has served nearly 2,400 new cloud clients. In fact, IBM plans to establish SoftLayer as the foundation of its cloud portfolio. IBM claims that the SoftLayer infrastructure will provide a scaleable, secure base for the global delivery of cloud services spanning IBM’s middleware and SaaS solutions. SoftLayer’s flexibility and global network will also facilitate faster development, deployment and delivery of mobile, analytic, social solutions as clients adopt cloud as a delivery platform for IT operations and manage their business. Last week IBM made a significant investment and established the IBM Watson Group, a new business unit dedicated to the development and commercialisation of cloud-delivered cognitive and Big Data innovations. As part of this initiative IBM will also deploy Watson on SoftLayer.