Another day, another snippet of news from IBM in its latest push for cloudy world domination: Big Blue has announced expansion plans for Canada, including a SoftLayer data centre in Toronto.

SoftLayer chose Toronto not just for its size – it’s the fourth largest city in North America – but its proximity to the tech community in Canada, as well as a litany of companies who are using the IaaS provider.

A glut of Canadian startups, including Mnubo, Epilogger and Maegan, have signed up for the SoftLayer Catalyst program, which offers discounts and offers for SoftLayer’s infrastructure, as well as consultancy and other resources. “We are very excited to see SoftLayer open a data centre in Toronto,” said Maegan co-founder Brenda Crainic in a statement.

Canadian expansion for SoftLayer follows its previous travels, launching data centres in the UK, Hong Kong and Central Europe. Customers can store and use the data centre immediately.

Last month IBM and SoftLayer celebrated their first anniversary together with yet more announcements, including an intriguing partnership between SoftLayer and Watson which gives the Jeopardy-winning supercomputer the keys to analyse SoftLayer’s big data.

Frequent chats with SoftLayer and IBM over the course of that first 12 months have revealed nothing but praise and excitement for the way the partnership is working out. SoftLayer EMEA managing director Jonathan Wisler described the marriage as “phenomenal” to CloudTech back in June.

Naturally this isn’t the only news to come out of IBM towers in recent days: the IT giant has also announced the acquisition of Lighthouse as part of its identity and access management offering, not to mention the government contract with California that Big Blue had won last month.

Find out more about the Canadian SoftLayer data centre here.