IBM Launches Second Cloud Center in Australia

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA--(Marketwired - Mar 10, 2015) - Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced the opening of its newest SoftLayer cloud center in Sydney, Australia. As part of IBM's $1.2 billion investment to expand its cloud services, the new facility joins Melbourne in meeting the growing customer demand for scalable cloud solutions with global reach in Australia.

Since launching its first Australian cloud center in Melbourne late last year, IBM Cloud has added hundreds of new customers and experienced a boom across other SoftLayer facilities in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo.

Building on this success, the new Sydney facility makes it easy for Australian customers, or those looking for an Australian location, to tap into IBM's enterprise-grade offerings. It broadens data redundancy options within Australia and APAC while providing secure, scalable, and customizable infrastructure solutions for both enterprise and born-on-the-Web businesses. This enables IBM Cloud's customers, such as rapidly growing Australian company ChannelPace, to deliver their services at a global scale.

"Two of ChannelPace's key priorities are global reach and scalability," said ChannelPace CEO Greg Furlong, a crowd-sourced contact management system for the business-to-business world. "IBM Cloud's growing number of SoftLayer data centers -- all connected via SoftLayer's global network -- make it easy for us to expand and grow our business. With the Melbourne data center and new Sydney data center, we have the option of data redundancy right here in our backyard."

As part of Catalyst, SoftLayer's startup accelerator program, ChannelPace launched its company out of stealth mode and expanded its business into 56 countries on the SoftLayer platform.

"As member of Catalyst, we are able to leverage IBM Cloud's entire SoftLayer portfolio, including its unique network-within-a-network architecture, which has helped us deliver unlimited traffic 'on network' between servers in different data center locations around the world," said Furlong. "We truly consider IBM Cloud's SoftLayer to be an extension of our business."

New Zealand-based customer Grinding Gear Games hosts the online action RPG "Path of Exile" in five IBM Cloud centers worldwide. For Grinding Gear Games, the broadening of the SoftLayer global network means eliminating latency and providing a reliable and enjoyable experience for end users.

"Extremely fast provisioning times and the ability to automate such provisioning allow us to treat SoftLayer's bare metal servers like virtual servers so that we can scale up rapidly when player numbers increase," said Chris Wilson, managing director, Grinding Gear Games, an independent video game development studio. "SoftLayer's free and reliable back-end connection between data centers is critical to the stable operation of our game service. As IBM Cloud expands its SoftLayer services to more countries globally, we'll also be expanding the breadth of 'Path of Exile,' simply by hosting servers in each new data center."

The Sydney cloud center offers the full range of SoftLayer cloud infrastructure services, including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage, security services, and networking. It was built using SoftLayer's standardized pod design and has capacity for thousands of physical servers. With services deployed on demand and full remote access and control via a customer Web portal or API, customers can create their ideal public, private, or hybrid cloud environments.

In addition, SoftLayer will be conducting a series of training courses for anyone looking for thorough instruction and hands-on activities to become more proficient using the SoftLayer cloud platform. To find out more visit: http://www.softlayer.com/training. For more information about SoftLayer's cloud centers, visit http://www.softlayer.com/datacenters.

About IBM Cloud Computing
IBM is the global leader in open enterprise cloud enabling secure data and infrastructure integration in the 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 www.thoughtsoncloud.com. Join the conversation #ibmcloud.