SoftLayer

History

• Year 2005: SoftLayer was established in 2005 by Lance Crosby and several of his ex-coworkers.
• Year 2010 - August: GI Partners acquired a majority equity stake in SoftLayer in August 2010.
• Year 2010 - November: In November of that year it merged the company with The Planet Internet Services, SoftLayer's biggest competitor, and consolidated the customer base under the SoftLayer brand.
• 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.
• Year 2011 - July: In July 2011, the company announced plans for international expansion to Amsterdam and Singapore to add to the existing network of North American-based data centers in Dallas, San Jose, Seattle, Santiago de Querétaro, Houston and Washington, D.C.. Most of these data centers were leased via Digital Realty Trust.
• 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, to form an IBM Cloud Services Division. At the time of acquisition, SoftLayer was described as the biggest privately held cloud infrastructure provider in the world.
• Year 2015 - May: As of May 2015, the company has 23 data centers in 11 different countries.
• Year 2018: By 2018, SoftLayer was renamed to IBM Cloud.