Two Technology Giants are considering at buying major infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider SoftLayer in a deal that could be worth staggering more than $2 Billion Reuters reports.
Dallas-based IaaS company SoftLayer closely competes with Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, and others. SoftLayer is a popular choice for IaaS proven by having more than 25,000 small-to-huge customers, including AT&T, SendGrid, Citrix, and Path. It has 13 data centers around US, Europe, and Asia and has raised $30 million in venture capital to date.
Interesting fact that both EMC and IBM are showing interest in buying SoftLayer and ready to splash the cash shows that the company has been successful in tapping markets to use its public cloud over so many other choices.
IBM in particular is showing much interests since it already offers its own cloud infrastructure products. IBM might want SoftLayer’s data centers and tech to bolster its efforts.
Storage giant EMC, on the other hand could be looking at SoftLayer to combine with the efforts of cloud services giant VMware which owns a majority stake of.
Andreas Wasita 