IBM's Cloud Fuels Growth for Clients Around the Globe

LAS VEGAS, Feb. 25, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM^® (NYSE: IBM) today announced that clients from across industries and around the world are taking advantage of IBM's cloud solutions to improve flexibility, drive international expansion and better respond to today's fast-moving and ever-changing business environment.

Businesses and government agencies around the world are quickly adopting cloud computing, not only to lower costs but also to improve business processes, reinvent relationships with their customers and enter new markets easier and more efficiently.  Through IBM's engagement with global industry leaders like Turk Telekom, The Loft Group, Music Mastermind, KUULUU and many others, IBM continues to extend its cloud leadership worldwide to support companies that are increasingly relying on the cloud to market, sell, and develop products, manage supply chains and more. 

Turk Telekom also wanted to closely track costs and clearly communicate the pricing structure of the new cloud services to end users. "We wanted to make our system administrators and developers aware of the costs related to their demands," said Mehmet Selcuk Karaca, Turk Telekom consultant. "IBM's cloud offered a metering and billing solution to help us do that."

To address a varied spectrum of client needs and requirements, IBM offers a broad set of cloud capabilities in the world spanning private, public and hybrid clouds, as well as infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service-based solutions. Together, these offerings are driving tremendous growth for IBM, delivering $4.4 billion of revenue for cloud-based solutions in 2013, up 69 percent year to year.

"IBM's commitment to invest in high growth areas stems from our focus on delivering the solutions our clients need to be successful in today's market and enabling them to be better positioned for tomorrow's growth," said IBM General Manager of Cloud Services Jim Comfort. "Our work with companies like the ones we are announcing today demonstrate that IBM is the only company that can deliver cloud solutions at a truly global level."

Today's news builds off other recent milestone in IBM's journey to provide on-going innovation in cloud computing including its $7 billion in 16 acquisitions and 40,000 industry experts, the company's recent acquisition of SoftLayer^® and IBM's commitment to expand its global cloud offerings to 40 datacenters across five continents. In doing so, IBM intends to double SoftLayer's cloud capacity by the end of 2014. Since the acquisition, IBM SoftLayer has served nearly 2,400 new cloud clients and continues to see demand grow. Its distributed local data centers and global network give clients the ability to choose a cloud environment and location that best suit their business needs, have visibility to where data resides, and exercise control of data security and placement.

IBM's Global Cloud Network Spans the Globe
In the United States, Music Mastermind is taking advantage of IBM SoftLayer cloud capabilities to create a hybrid cloud environment for Zya, an application that allows people to make music, create beats and change vocals into instruments. Music Mastermind switched to an IBM SoftLayer cloud not only to lower costs, but also to scale and prepare for higher customer traffic more quickly and effectively with SoftLayer's cloud capabilities.

Additionally, in Turkey, IBM has signed an agreement with Turk Telekom, Turkey's leading telecom solutions provider, to supply IBM cloud solutions that will host automated cloud provisioning and manage the company's development and test environment. Given that Turk Telekom's network infrastructure spans the entire country to offer a variety of telecom services to residential and commercial customers, the company engaged IBM to develop a cloud solution that could ease the burden that nation-wide service delivery places on its IT staff. Through its relationship with IBM, Turk Telekom is able to utilize its existing infrastructure, closely track costs and clearly communicate the pricing structure of the new cloud services to its customers.

In Australia, The Loft Group, a creative digital agency specializing in creating e-learning campaigns for global clients including L'Oreal, has adopted IBM's cloud services to transform its business. Based on its need to quickly scale to several new global markets, The Loft Group is migrating its digital learning platform onto IBM's SoftLayer cloud infrastructure to deliver custom, mobile education and training platforms to clients. The Loft Group was also attracted to IBM SoftLayer because the technology provided the company's customer support teams with the ability to use analytics to monitor and tune their networks in the cloud, providing more consistent and effective performance.

With the launch of the highly anticipated RECHARGE, KUULUU a game development studio in Switzerland, needed a high performance and scalable service to support the game. Together with Linkin Park, they created a third-person 3-D online experience that combines puzzle, adventure and action elements. The game supports Music For Relief Power the World campaign, by introducing players to the real world clean energy solutions in the game. A big percentage of Linkin Park's audience are gamers, and as the biggest band on Facebook with over 55 million followers, using gaming as a vehicle gets to those fans on a personal level. 

About IBM Cloud Computing
IBM has helped more than 30,000 clients around the world with 40,000 industry experts. Today, IBM has 100+ cloud SaaS solutions, thousands of experts with deep industry knowledge helping clients transform and a network of 40 data centers worldwide.  Since 2007, IBM has invested more than $7 billion in 16 acquisitions to accelerate its cloud initiatives and build a high value cloud portfolio. IBM holds 1,560 cloud patents focused on driving innovation. In fact, IBM for the 21st consecutive year topped the annual list of US patent leaders. IBM processes more the 5.5M client transactions daily through IBM's public cloud. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/cloud. Follow us on Twitter at @IBMcloud and on our blog at http://www.thoughtsoncloud.com.  Join the conversation #ibmcloud.

Media Contact:
Scott Cook
IBM Communications
312.669.4743
[email protected]

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SOURCE IBM