IBM said Monday that it had closed its estimated ~$2 billion acquisition of public cloud infrastructure house SoftLayer Technologies, which is supposed to help Big Blue compete against IaaS market leader Amazon Web Services.
The eight-year-old company has been paired with IBM’s private SmartCloud unit to create a new Cloud Services Division reporting to GM Jim Comfort to pursue a share of what IDC figures could be a $105 billion market by 2016.
Before the acquisition IBM had an internal goal of reaching $7 billion in cloud revenue by the end of 2015, a bogie that reportedly remains unchanged. IBM’s cloud revenues were up a reported 80% last year.
SoftLayer brings IBM 13 data centers worldwide and 21,000 customers, largely SMBs. The new IBM division where SoftLayer now lives will be chasing both IBM and SoftLayer clients, ISVs, and channel and technology partners.