Following the acquisition of SoftLayer in June last year, IBM continues to invest in the Cloud – € 7 billion in acquisitions since 2007 – for a potential revenue estimated at $ 7 billion in 2015. SoftLayer has since been in charge of Big Blue’s Cloud activities with, among other things, the deployment of thirteen data centers around the globe, most recently in Hong Kong.

Now that the infrastructure is in place, IBM logically announced the release of its own private network, called Direct Link, to connect customers to the SoftLayer platforms with improved security, throughput and latency. Available in the United States, Europe and Asia, this dedicated interconnection service is the equivalent of GoGrid’s or OVH’s. Although SoftLayer provides no performance details, the main goal for IBM is to provide customers with contractual SLAs, a sine qua non credibility condition for high performance remote services.