Tech giant IBM has announced the acquisition of cloud infrastructure provider SoftLayer, evidently hoping to strengthen IBM’s position in the cloud infrastructure as a service space.

It’s not hard to imagine the reasons around this. Dallas-based SoftLayer calls its platform “cloud without compromise”, and describes itself as the largest privately held cloud infrastructure provider in the world.

IBM’s cloud portfolio certainly hits home enterprise-side, particularly with its public backing of OpenStack, and SoftLayer’s technology will give the enterprises a wider range of cloudy options.

Therefore, it’s the perfect sort of company for IBM to swallow up, and adds another player into the bubbling IaaS mix.

The past couple of months have seen acquisitions, launches and rollouts galore from major players looking to get ahead in the race – or, perhaps more pertinently, get closer to Amazon, as CloudTech examined yesterday.

From Google’s Compute Engine release …