SoftLayer's 9 Biggest Customer Wins

Many Thumbs Up

When IBM purchased SoftLayer on June 13, 2013, it reported 21,000 customers with a global cloud infrastructure platform spanning 13 data centers. Today, SoftLayer boasts 28,000 customers with 18 data centers worldwide and it says it will expand to 40 data centers in 15 countries by year's end.

SoftLayer is the crown jewel in IBM CEO Ginni Rometty's strategy to transform the company into a business focused on the cloud, analytics, mobile, and social aspects of IT. Over the past 12 months IBM has said it plans to invest $3.2 billion on growing the data center footprint, creating a cloud Platform-as-a-Service called Bluemix and launching a Watson business unit, with Watson running on SoftLayer.

Here are SoftLayer's nine biggest wins since being acquired by IBM.

$1 Billion Contract With U.S. Department of Interior

Last August when the U.S. Department of Interior decided to move its IT system to the cloud, it inked a $1 billion 10-year deal with SoftLayer. IBM said the deal includes data storage, secure file transfer, virtual machines, database, Web hosting, development testing and SAP application hosting.

$500 Million Deal With Insurer The Hartford

IBM and Hartford, Conn.-based insurer The Hartford closed a deal this past April worth $500 million to create a private cloud-based infrastructure to help facilitate the company's storage, backup and IT resiliency.

$10 Million Cloud Construction Contract With Novitex

When leading digital document management firm Novitex needed a cloud platform to ensure data security, privacy and compliance, it turned to SoftLayer. In April the company inked a $10 million deal to provide an open, scalable and secure IaaS platform.

$600 Million Deal With NiSource For Hybrid Cloud

NiSource, an Indiana-based energy company, signed a $600 million deal with SoftLayer in May to create and manage a hybrid cloud computing environment. The regional energy firm said it would leverage SoftLayer's scaling agility, analytics capabilities, and the ability to match computing workloads with the best-fit infrastructure.

Whirlpool Turns To SoftLayer For Cloud Help

SoftLayer and Whirlpoool shook hands on a deal in July on a deal to transition the home appliance maker's on-premise cloud to a globally integrated cloud. Financial terms of the deal were not released. "By using IBM Cloud capabilities, Whirlpool can provision its applications faster and increase flexibility to integrate managed and nonmanaged services with future workloads," the two companies said in a joint statement.

California Teams With SoftLayer On CalCloud System

California became the first state in the U.S. to allow all its state and local government agencies to move key compute needs to a common IT cloud platform. The California Department of Technology said the SoftLayer platform would be available on a subscription basis. The big win for California, IBM said, is municipalities will be able to focus on public projects and not capital expenditures on IT. At the time of the deal in July, 20 California state agencies had signed up for the service. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Aluminum Manufacturer Signs Five-Year Deal With SoftLayer

Sapa, a Norwegian aluminum manufacturer, signed a five-year deal with IBM that leverages SoftLayer's cloud services to help manage the firm's 200 international locations supporting 11,000 end users. SoftLayer's cloud solutions, Sapa reps said, allow a global delivery model for IT, which provides standardized IT services and centralized administration. No financial terms were released.

SoftLayer Wins Deal With Daimler Subsidiary

Car manufacturing giant Daimler's subsidiary, Moovel, signed a deal with SoftLayer to develop and distribute mobile apps for its car2go ride sharing service. While terms of the deal were not released, Moovel said it would use SoftLayer's cloud infrastructure to maximize performance for its apps.

Bare-Metal Server For Macy's

Department store giant Macy's will use SoftLayer's bare-metal server capabilities to deliver a shared cloud infrastructure for its retail stores. SoftLayer, it said, will help deliver scalability and 24/7 uptime. Bare-metal servers are unique and differ from virtualized server environments, giving a company the ability to customize its server from the ground up and excel at handling processor-intensive and disk I/O-intensive workloads.