IBM last week announced that it will commit over $ 1.2 billion in order to expand its global cloud footprint. IBM plans to have cloud facilities in major geographies and key financial centers expanding from 15 to 40 data centers worldwide. It will open data centers in Washington D.C., Hong Kong, London, Japan, India, China, Canada, Mexico and Dallas also it wants to expand to the Middle East and Africa in 2015. In order to achieve this IBM will use the technology which it acquired when buying Softlayer paying $2 billion in July last year. In order to expand its presence IBM has created a new business unit called the Watson Group, which will focus on development and commercialization of cloud-delivered innovations.
This week IBM also announced that plans to sell its x86 server business to Lenovo, the company which already aquired IBM’s PC business in 2005. Lenovo will take over
System x, BladeCenter and Flex System blade servers and switches, x86-based Flex integrated systems, NeXtScale and iDataPlex servers and associated software, blade networking and maintenance operations and pay about $2.3 billion.
IBM will retain its System z mainframes, Power Systems, Storage Systems, Power-based Flex servers, and PureApplication and PureData appliances.