Through the middle of 2013, IBM has shown a keen interest in the cloud gaming industry. After the acquisition of cloud server company SoftLayer that serves more than 25,000 customers, IBM states that the number of active players that use the IBM SoftLayer cloud since 2012 has grown to 130 million people.

Last month, KUULUU, Multiplay and DATAHOTEL were some of the gaming companies that moved to the IBM SoftLayer cloud platform. IBM SoftLayer provides an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) layer to the online gaming industry and are going to build 40 sites this year and then add to that in 2015 and 2016.

KULULU chose SoftLayer cloud to ensure performance and scalability for its new game, RECHARGE, created with Linkin Park, one of the most popular groups on Facebook with 55 million fans, meanwhile, Multiplay has also opted for the SoftLayer for its famous Battlefield 4 game.

IBM accelerates with IaaS

SoftLayer can be considered a direct competitor of Amazon and RackSpace. In last one year, the IaaS infrastructure of SoftLayer has attracted more gaming companies than others. With SoftLayer, IBM will accelerate the construction of its public cloud infrastructure to offer customers a broader regarding cloud offerings choice. Through its portfolio of SmartCloud solutions, IBM already has an extensive range of cloud services, including PureSystems and SmartCloud Enterprise and a catalog of over 100 SaaS business applications.

SoftLayer is a business that avoids the traditional segmentation of the cloud market, and puts forward a more unique set of technologies to distribute applications on a cloud model, both public, private, virtualized and bare-metal. As a way to provide companies several options to reduce the costs of migration to cloud infrastructures, SoftLayer opens new perspectives for what can be placed in the cloud.

IBM Bare Metal solution delivers a large number of hardware server, network, storage and security configurations, offering a high level of customization. The configurations are available with strong numeracy and information processing adapted to HPC, big data and business analytics.

As SiliconAngle associate editor Kyt Dotson reported since SoftLayer provides a hybrid IaaS experience to developers, applications can be built more quickly to take advantage of sheer power and elasticity as needed. For DevOps teams this means an increased sense of stability along with the ability to elastically stretch compute when needed (or save on cost during lower traffic hours.)  For the global market, IBM SoftLayer’s still-expanding network of datacenters will also give DevOps teams a huge breath of fresh air when it comes to being “closer” to audience members to lower that ever-feared latency.

“Particular to gaming, it’s all about horsepower, so they always want the latest and greatest,” said Lance Crosby, the CEO of SoftLayer, who recently spoke with TheStreet. “We’re one of the only providers out there that offers the bare metal with the GPU inside the server and multiple GPUs inside the same physical server.”

Crosby said SoftLayer infrastructure is not just providing game service but also providing the revenue source. Game developers actually creating software that will allow millions of people to be in the same virtual instance at the same time. Fortune 2,500 companies advertising products inside the games just like they advertise inside the Super Bowl.

An edge over Amazon

IBM says more than 2,500 new customers including gaming clients have signed up with SoftLayer, since its purchase. SoftLayer has 13 data centres worldwide, operating about 120,000 physical nodes and millions of virtual machines at any given moment. IBM is also investing $1.2 billion in investment to expansion of its global private cloud network including the construction of 15 more data centers, bringing the total to 40. This makes the organization one of the big four cloud operators worldwide, alongside Google, Amazon and Windows Azure.

Running gaming applications on bare metal servers gives developers both the raw performance and consistency they need to analyze vast amounts of data in real-time. Amazon and other technology vendors are yet to support bare metal services. Bare metal cloud gives developers with certain workloads the opportunity to enjoy the flexibility, provisioning, and on-demand billing advantages of cloud computing. It’s scalable and pay as you go—all the power and advantages of virtualized hardware without the overhead of a hypervisor.

SoftLayer delivers the service in the very specific way that provides a hybrid network with a global footprint and fast provisioning for gaming industry. The service also provides collective combination of tool sets, application process interfaces (APIs), and ease of use and interfacing have been extra supporting factors for SoftLayer.

“Almost all of the gaming companies run on the bare metal so they can get all the use of the hardware, refresh the latest and greatest hardware. And we compare that with the focus that we’ve had on the network. We’ve built our own global backbone — it’s all about speed and latency,” said Crosby.

“Lots of videos you can imagine almost look lifelike and so it’s all about speed, it’s all about performance, and the new layer in our API set — they build it directly into the games so they can have that functionality and scalability. And that’s why a lot of the larger gaming companies especially, have come to SoftLayer and have been customers here for long, long time.”

The hybrid cloud approach of SoftLayer is making it possible for large gaming companies to have their own installation but use the cloud infrastructure of SoftLayer to reduce capital expenditure.

“And that’s the use of the cloud because it would be near impossible for them to make capital expenditures on a game where they may be expecting 10 million users to play and it ends up being 150 million users. And so that’s why we’re so popular with the gaming world because we can literally go title by title and have a variable cost for the games,” he added.

Meanwhile, SoftLayer is also set to be the platform from which IBM will deliver Watson as a cloud service, targeting business intelligence and analytics applications, especially where large volumes of data are involved. Companies will be able to use Watson technology to do business analytics against their big data sources.