IBM buys cloud computing company SoftLayer transaction amount or $ billion

Beijing time June 5, according to Reuters, IBM said in Tuesday that it will acquire the U.S. cloud computing services company SoftLayer Technologies to create a new cloud computing business unit to enhance its competitiveness in the increasingly hot cloud services market.

IBM and SoftLayer executives declined to comment on the financial terms involved in the deal when they received telephone interviews. But the deal is about $2 billion trillion, according to people familiar with the matter. As early as this March, there was news that IBM plans to buy SoftLayer Technologies at a price of more than 2 billion dollars.

Founded in 2005, SoftLayer Technologies is headquartered in Dallas (Dallas), a private holding company with the main stake in the California Private Equity fund, GI partner. The company has 13 data centers in the United States, Singapore and the Netherlands, with 25,000 customers, including US telephone and telegraph companies and Citrix Systems. The company's cloud computing services are fiercely competitive with the cloud services of Amazon and Rackspace hosting.

In an interview, Erisy Clementi Clementi, IBM's senior vice president for global technology services, said only that the acquisition was a direct acquisition by IBM for its large business sector, "We are the world's largest infrastructure provider and this is our focus." ”

Gray Powell, an analyst at Wells Fargo (Wells Fargo), expects the deal to be valued at 11.1 times times the expected earnings of SoftLayer company for 2013 years without interest, tax, depreciation and amortization.

IBM says that in the future it will create a new department called Cloud Services, which will make SoftLayer and IBM's existing products a global platform. By the end of 2015, IBM is expected to receive 7 billion of dollars in revenue from the cloud services business each year.

IBM said it expects the deal to be completed in the third quarter of this year. The stock market closed in Tuesday, with IBM's shares down about 1% per cent, at $206.78.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)