SoftLayer Technologies, Inc. (now IBM Cloud) was adedicated server,managed hosting, andcloud computing provider, founded in 2005 and acquired byIBM in 2013. SoftLayer initially specialized in hosting workloads for gaming companies and startups, but shifted focus to enterprise workloads after its acquisition.[2]
Year 2005: SoftLayer was established in 2005 by Lance Crosby and several of his ex-coworkers.[5]
Year 2010 - August:GI Partners acquired a majority equity stake in SoftLayer in August 2010.[6]
Year 2010 - November: In November of that year it merged the company withThe Planet Internet Services, SoftLayer's biggest competitor, and consolidated the customer base under the SoftLayer brand.[7][8]
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.[9]
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,[12] to form anIBM Cloud Services Division.[13][14] At the time of acquisition, SoftLayer was described as the biggest privately held cloud infrastructure provider (IaaS) in the world.[15]
Year 2015 - May: As of May 2015, the company has 23 data centers in 11 different countries.[16]
Year 2018: By 2018, SoftLayer was renamed to IBM Cloud.[17]
In June 2013, IBM acquiredSoftLayer, a public cloud platform, to serve as the foundation for its IaaS offering. Bluemix was announced for public beta in February 2014[18] after having been developed since early 2013.[19] Bluemix was based on the open sourceCloud Foundry project and ran on SoftLayer infrastructure. IBM announced the general availability of the Bluemix Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering in July 2014.[20]
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).[21] Bluemix had grown to 83,000 users inIndia with growth of approximately 10,000 users each month.[21]
A year after announcement, Bluemix had made little headway in the cloud-computing platform space relative to its competition, and remained substantially behind market leadersMicrosoftAzure andAmazon AWS.[22] By August 2016, little had changed in market acceptance of the Bluemix offering.[23] In February 2016,[24] IBM Bluemix includes IBM'sFunction as a Service (FaaS) system, orServerless computing offering, that is built using open source[25] from the Apache OpenWhisk incubator project largely credited[26] to IBM for seeding. This system, equivalent toAmazon Lambda,Microsoft Azure Functions,Oracle Cloud Fn orGoogle Cloud Functions, allows calling of a specific function in response to an event without requiring any resource management from the developer.[27]
In May 2017 IBM released Kubernetes support as the IBM Bluemix Container Service, later renamed to the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service (IKS).[28] IKS was built using the open sourceKubernetes project. This system, equivalent toAmazon Web Services EKS,Microsoft Azure AKS, orGoogle Cloud 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.[29] In March 2018, IBM launched an industry first managed Kubernetes service on bare metal.[30] In August 2019, 3 weeks after the close of Red Hat acquisition, IBM launched a managed Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud.[31]
In November 2019, IBM has announced that it had designed the world's first financial services-ready public cloud and thatBank of America was its first committed collaborator and anchor customer, joined shortly thereafter in 2020 byBNP Paribas as its first European anchor client.[32] IBM announced in April 2021 the general availability of IBM Cloud for Financial Services, including support for Red Hat OpenShift and other cloud-native technologies.[33] In July 2021, it was announced thatSAP is onboarding two of its finance and data management solutions to IBM Cloud for Financial Services.[34] In September 2021, it wasCaixaBank's turn to boost digital capabilities with IBM Cloud for Financial Services[35] and onboarding to new IBM Cloud Multizone Region in Spain.[36]
In May 2020, IBM announced agreements with six European companies, includingOsram andCrédit Mutuel, that use IBM Cloud to access advanced technologies such as AI, blockchain and analytics.[38]
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 latestPower,Intel, andAMDCPUs andNvidiaGPUs.[39]
^"Cloud Infrastructure Solutions".IBM.com. IBM. Retrieved21 August 2025.The IBM Cloud approach to IaaS lets you scale… around the world in more than 60 data centers… 60 data centers across 19 countries.
