It’s official. IBM is now a cloud company. Big Blue has announced it is to push $1bn (£597.6m) of its resources and investments into cloud, including a developer-friendly platform as a service (PaaS) offering called BlueMix.

The Armonk giant also revealed it was to push SoftLayer into a variety of new zones, including making Watson available on the platform.

Amidst a plethora of announcements within the billion dollar investment, IBM SVP software and cloud solutions Robert LeBlanc described it as “another significant move in extending true cloud integration.”

“IBM is ushering in a bold new era of innovation by partnering with developers in an open environment to accelerate the emerging world of hybrid cloud computing,” he said. “We are combining the strength of our developer ecosystem with the depth of subject matter expertise to build a scalable model that easily spans from a single developer to global teams …