IBM Cloud, (formerly known as Bluemix) is a set of

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mu ...

services for business offered by the information technology company IBM.

Services

As of 2021, IBM Cloud contains more than 170 services including

compute Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, e ...

, storage, networking,

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...

, analytics,

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

, and developer tools.

History

SoftLayer

SoftLayer Technologies, Inc. (now IBM Cloud) was a

dedicated server A dedicated hosting service, dedicated server, or managed hosting service is a type of Internet hosting in which the client leases an entire server not shared with anyone else. This is more flexible than shared hosting, as organizations hav ...

, managed hosting, and

provider, founded in 2005 and acquired by IBM in 2013. SoftLayer initially specialized in hosting workloads for gaming companies and startups, but shifted focus to enterprise workloads after its acquisition. SoftLayer had

bare-metal In computer science, bare machine (or bare metal) refers to a computer executing instructions directly on logic hardware without an intervening operating system. Modern operating systems evolved through various stages, from elementary to the pre ...

compute offerings before other large cloud providers such as

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide d ...

. SoftLayer has hosted workloads for companies such as

The Hartford The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc., usually known as The Hartford, is a United States-based investment and insurance company. The Hartford is a Fortune 500 company headquartered in its namesake city of Hartford, Connecticut. It was ranke ...

WhatsApp WhatsApp (also called WhatsApp Messenger) is an internationally available freeware, cross-platform, centralized instant messaging (IM) and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by American company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook). It allows use ...

Whirlpool A whirlpool is a body of rotating water produced by opposing currents or a current running into an obstacle. Small whirlpools form when a bath or a sink is draining. More powerful ones formed in seas or oceans may be called maelstroms ( ). ''Vo ...

, Daimler, and

Macy's Macy's (originally R. H. Macy & Co.) is an American chain of high-end department stores founded in 1858 by Rowland Hussey Macy. It became a division of the Cincinnati-based Federated Department Stores in 1994, through which it is affiliated wi ...

Timeline

* Year 2005: SoftLayer was established in 2005 by Lance Crosby and several of his ex-coworkers. * Year 2010 - August:

GI Partners GI Partners is a leading upper middle market private equity firm based in San Francisco, California. Description Founded in 2001, GI Partners is a private investment firm with over 100 employees with offices in San Francisco, New York, Chicago ...

acquired a majority equity stake in SoftLayer in August 2010. * Year 2010 - November: In November of that year it merged the company with

The Planet Internet Services The Planet was a privately held dedicated server company based in Texas. In May 2006, the company merged with Everyone's Internet, which used the EV1 Servers brand. In 2010, they merged with SoftLayer. All services provided by both companies w ...

, SoftLayer's biggest competitor, and consolidated the customer base under the SoftLayer brand. * Year 2011 - Q1: In Q1 2011, the company reported hosting more than 81,000 servers for more than 26,000 customers in locations throughout the United States. * Year 2011 - July: In July 2011, the company announced plans for international expansion to

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the capital and most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population of 907,976 within the city proper, 1,558,755 in the urban ar ...

and

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, bor ...

to add to the existing network of North American-based data centers in

Dallas Dallas () is the List of municipalities in Texas, third largest city in Texas and the largest city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the List of metropolitan statistical areas, fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States at 7.5 ...

(

Texas Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by ...

), San Jose (

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

(

Washington Washington commonly refers to: * Washington (state), United States * Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States ** A metonym for the federal government of the United States ** Washington metropolitan area, the metropolitan area centered o ...

Santiago de Querétaro Santiago (, ; ), also known as Santiago de Chile, is the capital and largest city of Chile as well as one of the largest cities in the Americas. It is the center of Chile's most densely populated region, the Santiago Metropolitan Region, whose ...

(

Mexico Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...

Houston Houston (; ) is the most populous city in Texas, the most populous city in the Southern United States, the fourth-most populous city in the United States, and the sixth-most populous city in North America, with a population of 2,304,580 i ...

(

) and

Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

Most of these data centers were leased via

Digital Realty Digital Realty Trust, Inc. is a real estate investment trust that invests in carrier-neutral data centers and provides colocation and peering services. As of December 31, 2019, the company owned interests in 225 operating data center facilitie ...

. * Year 2013 June 4: On June 4, 2013, IBM announced its acquisition of SoftLayer under undisclosed financial terms, in a deal that according to Reuters could have fetched more than $2 billion, to form an IBM Cloud Services Division. At the time of acquisition, SoftLayer was described as the biggest privately held cloud infrastructure provider (IaaS) in the world. * Year 2015 - May: As of May 2015, the company has 23 data centers in 11 different countries. * Year 2018: By 2018, SoftLayer was renamed to IBM Cloud.

Initial launch of Bluemix (2013-2016)

In June 2013, IBM acquired

SoftLayer IBM Cloud, (formerly known as Bluemix) is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by the information technology company IBM. Services As of 2021, IBM Cloud contains more than 170 services including compute, storage, networki ...

, a public cloud platform, to serve as the foundation for its IaaS offering. Bluemix was announced for public beta in February 2014 after having been developed since early 2013. Bluemix was based on the open source

Cloud Foundry Cloud Foundry is an open source, multi-cloud application platform as a service (PaaS) governed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation, a 501(c)(6) organization. The software was originally developed by VMware, transferred to Pivotal Software (a joint ...

project and ran on SoftLayer infrastructure. IBM announced the general availability of the Bluemix Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering in July 2014.IBM's Bluemix PaaS Now Generally Available

eWeek ''eWeek'' (''Enterprise Newsweekly'', stylized as ''eWEEK''), formerly PCWeek, is a technology and business magazine. Previously owned by QuinStreet; Nashville, Tennessee marketing company TechnologyAdvice acquired eWeek in 2020. The print edi ...

, 1 July 2014. Retrieved 29 October 2018. By April 2015, Bluemix included a suite of over 100 cloud-based development tools "including social, mobile, security, analytics, database, and IoT ( internet of things). Bluemix had grown to 83,000 users in

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

with growth of approximately 10,000 users each month.IBM Bluemix finds converts from Amazon, Azure in India
''

The Times of India ''The Times of India'', also known by its abbreviation ''TOI'', is an Indian English-language daily newspaper and digital news media owned and managed by The Times Group. It is the third-largest newspaper in India by circulation and largest ...

'', 16 May 2015. Retrieved 29 October 2018. A year after announcement, Bluemix had made little headway in the cloud-computing platform space relative to its competition, and remained substantially behind market leaders

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

Azure and Amazon AWS.Gartner shows two-horse race in IaaS cloud: AWS and Microsoft Azure: A “year of reckoning” leaves all other vendors behind
Brandon Butler, NetworkWorld, 20 May 2015. Retrieved 29 October 2018. By August 2016, little had changed in market acceptance of the Bluemix offering.AWS, Microsoft Azure Top Gartner's Magic Quadrant For IaaS
Charles Babcock, InformationWorld, 8 August 2016. Retrieved 29 October 2018. In February 2016, IBM Bluemix includes IBM's Function as a Service (FaaS) system, or

Serverless Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider allocates machine resources on demand, taking care of the servers on behalf of their customers. "Serverless" is a misnomer in the sense that servers are still ...

computing offering, that is built using open source from the Apache OpenWhisk incubator project largely credited to IBM for seeding. This system, equivalent to Amazon Lambda, Microsoft Azure Functions,

Oracle Cloud Oracle Cloud is a cloud computing service offered by Oracle Corporation providing servers, storage, network, applications and services through a global network of Oracle Corporation managed data centers. The company allows ...

Fn or

Google Cloud Functions Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Drive, and YouTube. Alongside ...

, allows calling of a specific function in response to an event without requiring any resource management from the developer.

Re-brand to IBM Cloud (2017–Present)

In May 2017 IBM released Kubernetes support as the IBM Bluemix Container Service, later renamed to the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service (IKS). IKS was built using the open source

Kubernetes Kubernetes (, commonly stylized as K8s) is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Google originally designed Kubernetes, but the Cloud Native Computing Foundation now maintains ...

project. This system, equivalent to

EKS, Microsoft Azure AKS, or

Google Cloud Google Cloud Platform offers numerous integrated cloud-computing services, including compute, network, and storage. Products Past and present products under the Google Cloud platform include: Current * Google Cloud Datastore, a NoSQL databa ...

GKE, aims to provide a platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts. In October 2017, IBM announced that they would rebrand their cloud as IBM Cloud brand, merging all components, thus retiring the Bluemix and Softlayer brands. In March 2018, IBM launched an industry first managed Kubernetes service on bare metal. In August 2019, 3 weeks after the close of Red Hat acquisition, IBM launched a managed Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud. In November 2019, IBM has announced that it has designed the world's first financial services-ready public cloud and that

Bank of America The Bank of America Corporation (often abbreviated BofA or BoA) is an American multinational investment bank and financial services holding company headquartered at the Bank of America Corporate Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. The bank ...

was its first committed collaborator and customer, and announced in April 2021, the general availability of IBM Cloud for Financial Services, including support for Red Hat OpenShift and other cloud-native technologies. In July 2021, it was announced that

SAP Sap is a fluid transported in xylem cells (vessel elements or tracheids) or phloem sieve tube elements of a plant. These cells transport water and nutrients throughout the plant. Sap is distinct from latex, resin, or cell sap; it is a separ ...

is onboarding two of its finance and data management solutions to IBM Cloud for Financial Services. In September 2021, it was

CaixaBank CaixaBank, S.A. (), formerly Criteria CaixaCorp, is a Spanish multinational financial services company. CaixaBank is based in Valencia, with operative offices in Madrid and Barcelona, Spain. It is Spain's third-largest lender by market value, ...

's turn to boost digital capabilities with IBM Cloud for Financial Services and onboarding to new IBM Cloud Multizone Region in Spain.

Customer base

In 2019, IBM partnered with the United States Tennis Association (USTA) to provide new AI-powered tools for the US Open. In May 2020, IBM announced agreements with six European companies, including Osram and

Crédit Mutuel Crédit Mutuel is a French cooperative banking group, one of the country's top five banks with over 30 million customers. It traces its origins back to the German cooperative movement inspired by Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen in Alsace–Lorraine ...

, that use IBM Cloud to access advanced technologies such as AI, blockchain and analytics.

Reviews

IBM Cloud continued to be considered a leader in bare-metal in 2020, and distinguished itself by providing over 11 million possible custom configurations with the latest

Power Power most often refers to: * Power (physics), meaning "rate of doing work" ** Engine power, the power put out by an engine ** Electric power * Power (social and political), the ability to influence people or events ** Abusive power Power may a ...

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

, and

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...

CPUs A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, and ...

and

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

GPUs A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobil ...

Environmental impact

In 2021, IBM announced it would achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

References

External links

* {{Authority control Cloud computing providers Cloud infrastructure Cloud platforms Web hosting