With the cloud era’s continued rise, the tech and industry behind it is already becoming big in Asia.  IBM answers the demand by opening two new data centers in Japan; the SmartCloud Enterprise, which will be located in Makuhari, and the Lotus Live (location pending), which will allow users to easily move in the cloud, will be open later this year.

Aside from this, IBM also has 13 lab clouds, seven of which are found in Asia Pacific: China, India, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore. But they are not the only ones expanding east.  Amazon beat IBM to the bunch, as it was the first to bring its cloud data center to Japan.  There’s also word of Amazon planning expansion in “The Land Down Under.

This addition for the SmartCloud will be the 6^th of IBM’s data centers.

The new facilities will extend IBM’s globally-integrated cloud delivery network of cloud computing centers that serve in over 50 countries around the world with centers based in Singapore, Germany, Canada, and the United States; and 13 global cloud labs, of which seven are based in Asia Pacific – China, India, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore.

For the first time, enterprise clients in Japan can select key characteristics of a public, private and hybrid cloud to match workload requirements from simple Web infrastructure to complex business processes, along five dimensions, including:

• Security and isolation
• Availability and performance
• Technology platforms
• Management Support and Deployment
• Payment and Billing

In other IBM news, the giant corporation was chosen by Connecticut Electric and UIL Holdings Corporation to provide security for their smart meters.  The smart meters will provide on-demand meter readings for customers without compromising the data.  CA Technologies also announced its support for IBM’s  zEnterprise Technology that lowers the total cost in mainframes.

So, if you’re an investor and are still fretting about the news that IBM is downgrading, it may be important to note IBM’s ongoing growth plans.  In Asian markets in particular, data centers and cloud services are becoming important factors in product expansion.