Dive Brief

• IBM will invest $1.2 billion in 2014 to expand the company's SoftLayer infrastructure for the cloud.
• SoftLayer will have 15 new data centers, totaling 40 locations in 13 countries.
• The company said that with sophisticated cloud services like SoftLayer, a retail CIO can, for one thing, handle spikes in traffic and avoid lost sales.
• The investment in SoftLayer’s cloud platform comes on the heels of IBM’s establishment of a Watson-based business segment to manage big data.

Dive Insight

Until now IBM has been close-mouthed about its cloud-services plans and in the past was openly unsure about the future of the cloud. The ongoing acquisitions of and investments in cloud services shows that the company has decided that business will increasingly be turning to the cloud to grow and improve multi-channel e-commerce activities.