IBM Opens 4 More US-Based Data Centers

IBM is planning to open four additional data centers in the US as part of the company's plan to build out regional cloud facilities across the globe to support initiatives ranging from cognitive computing to the Internet of Things.

Big Blue will open two data centers in Dallas and two in Washington DC as part of this plan, according to an April 26 statement. When these new facilities open, IBM will have 55 data centers worldwide, including 19 in the US.

IBM plans to open a total of eight data centers within the first half of 2017.

These data centers are part of IBM's effort to increase its public cloud presence in the face of competition from Amazon Web Services -- which is currently considered the leader in public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) -- as well as Microsoft and Google. (See AWS Maintains Its Public Cloud Dominance.)

Instead of building out massive data centers, IBM has focused more on smaller, regional cloud facilities in order to meet local concerns, such as privacy, security and other regulations within the European Union.

Figure 1: An IBM data center.
(Source: IBM)

Earlier this years, John Considine, the general manager of the company's cloud infrastructure business, told Enterprise Cloud News that IBM plans to spend "billions" on hardware throughout 2017 to help build these data centers. (See IBM's Big Hybrid Cloud Plan Calls for Big Infrastructure Investment.)

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Wednesday's announcement comes after the company suffered through its 20th straight quarter of revenue decline as its legacy businesses dragged down the bottom line during the first quarter of this year. However, the same report showed that cloud revenue was up 33% to $3.5 billion during the quarter. (See Legacy Business Still Dragging IBM Down.)

While AWS, Google and Microsoft have focused on bringing public cloud to as many businesses as possible, IBM and Oracle have focused more on their large enterprise customers, attempting to move these customers from on-premise software to their clouds.

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— Scott Ferguson, Editor, Enterprise Cloud News. Follow him on Twitter @sferguson_LR.