RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. – IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced on Monday that SoftLayer is fueling hybrid cloud adoption by attracting thousands of new clients including leading enterprises.

To support this ongoing growth, IBM is also launching a range of new cloud services designed for the enterprise that are based on SoftLayer infrastructure.

Just one year after its acquisition, SoftLayer has become the force behind IBM’s rapid acceleration to cloud leadership.

IBM bought SoftLayer for $2 billion in July 2013 and has continued to invest significantly in its cloud portfolio.

Big Blue reported that thousands of new clients have migrated to IBM Cloud via SoftLayer in the past year. New enterprise customers including Macy’s, Whirlpool, Daimler subsidiary moovel Gmbh, Sicoss Group and many others are transforming their operations for the emerging hybrid cloud era.

Hybrid cloud computing links traditional IT systems to the cloud while clients are able to maintain on-premise control of their key applications and data.

As data becomes the next great natural resource, clients are looking for the means to efficiently store and mine their data, while protecting its privacy and security.

“In its first year, SoftLayer has proven to be a pivotal acquisition for IBM Cloud,” said Erich Clementi, Senior Vice President, IBM Global Technology Services. “SoftLayer has quickly become the foundation of IBM’s cloud portfolio anchoring our infrastructure, platform and software-as-a-service offerings and transforming the fortunes of many industry companies from Web start-ups to established enterprises looking for the speed, flexibility and security that hybrid cloud environments provide.”

IBM Cloud designed to tackle big data

With big data creating demand for cloud, SoftLayer will play a pivotal role in delivering IBM’s rich data and analytics portfolio to clients faster, more effectively and efficiently.

Among the offerings, IBM will make available:

• Watson Engagement Advisor on SoftLayer which allows organizations to gain timely and actionable insights from big data, transforming the client experience through natural conversational interactions with system that get smarter with use. Running on IBM’s POWER8 processor, IBM Power Systems integrated into SoftLayer’s infrastructure will handle big data, analytics and cognitive requirements in the cloud with unprecedented speed.

• Watson Developer Cloud on SoftLayer allows unprecedented access for third-party developers, entrepreneurs, academics, and system integrators looking to harness Watson’s cognitive capabilities in the products and services they bring to market.

• IBM is now offering more than 300 services within the IBM cloud marketplace that is based on SoftLayer. This includes data and analytics and SoftLayer offerings such as the IBM multi-enterprise Relationship Management SaaS that connects and manages shared business processes across a variety of communities, Time Series Database that connects applications to the Internet of Things and Analytics Warehouse which provides an agile platform for data warehousing and analytics.

• Aspera high-speed transfer technology is now also available on SoftLayer enabling users to move large unstructured and structured data with maximum speed and security, regardless of data size, distance or network conditions.

• Code name Elastic Storage is a new software-defined storage-as-a-service offering built on SoftLayer. It provides organizations with high-speed access to large volumes of data and seamless data management between their on-premises infrastructure and the cloud.

• SoftLayer expands hourly billing for bare-metal servers bringing the key pay-as-you-go benefits of virtual server consumption to dedicated resources. Bare metal servers provide the increased performance and privacy that many enterprises desire.

• IBM Cloud modular management is a fully automated service management system to help companies to more easily govern new cloud application environments. IBM Cloud Modular management enables companies with the choice and flexibility to pick the services they want to manage on their own or have IBM manage for them.

• Jumpgate is another innovation from SoftLayer that will play a key role in helping businesses build their own hybrid cloud environments. Jumpgate allows for interoperability between clouds by providing compatibility between the OpenStack API and a provider’s proprietary API.

Big Blue’s Investments

Since the $2 billion acquisition of SoftLayer a year ago, IBM has continued to invest in making SoftLayer the foundation of its cloud portfolio.

These investments include:

• $1.2 billion investment to expand SoftLayer’s global data center footprint to 40 locations globally covering every major geography and financial center by 2015 and opening additional SoftLayer facilities in Melbourne, Toronto and Washington, D.C., in the third quarter of 2014.

• $1 billion to launch a Watson business unit, with Watson running on SoftLayer.

• $1 billion investment to establish a cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS), Bluemix to help millions of developers build cloud applications running on SoftLayer. IBM is extending its Bluemix developer platform on SoftLayer to more than 50 services including several big data and analytics technologies and is now the largest deployment of the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

• The launch of the IBM Cloud marketplace and cloud acquisitions including Cloudant, Silverpop and Aspera validating IBM’s commitment to SoftLayer.

Since 2007, IBM has invested more than $7 billion in 17 acquisitions including SoftLayer to accelerate its cloud initiatives and build a high value cloud portfolio. IBM currently holds 1,560 cloud patents.

[IBM ARCHIVE: Check out more than a decade of IBM stories as reported in WRAL TechWire.]