IBM is changing, reinventing business around the cloud. The coming together of industry trends such as cloud, mobile, social, and Big Data and analytics is helping to drive this change. IBM’s new cloud-oriented focus applies to IBM’s own business as well as its existing clients’ business.

To reinvent itself as a cloud-oriented business, IBM has been selling off its hardware groups and shifting gears to a services model. The company has also been making strategic cloud industry acquisitions, as well as creating innovative solutions based on initiatives such as Watson. To help its clients reinvent themselves as cloud-oriented companies, IBM is helping them transition from their legacy IT environments to more modern, software-driven data centers.

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Cloud lets businesses stay nimble

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The combination of cloud and other trends have brought the technology industry to a tipping point, according to John Mason, General Manager, Mid-Market at IBM. “This is one of those once-every-20-to-25-year shifts in this technology industry that you get to experience once, maybe twice in a career,” Mason told theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante at the IBM Pulse 2014 show in February.

“Right now we have the coming together of cloud, mobile, social, and Big Data and analytics, which is really changing everything—and particularly for small and medium businesses who…don’t have the in-house expertise…[or]…a lot of the infrastructure…[or]…bureaucracy of larger companies,” Mason continued. “So what cloud, in particular, lets them do is go really fast. And it’s all about speed and agility. And [it] really keeps it simple for smaller companies to find markets to go after growth and to do that very quickly and very nimbly.”

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IBM: Selling off hardware, focusing on services

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At IBM Pulse 2014, Mason commented on IBM’s global cloud business. He told theCUBE cohosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante that, in 2013, the company had $4.4 billion in cloud-based revenue—of which about $1 billion was for services.

Mason said cloud is already a “significant business for IBM. Now we’re doubling down.” He said IBM is investing $1.2 billion in infrastructure build out, along with other investments in cloud platforms.

As far as the global roll-out goes, Mason said that as of today, IBM has 13 data centers with SoftLayer and 12 at IBM. “And we’ll take it to 40 by the end of the year,” he added.

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IBM’s key cloud acquisitions: SoftLayer and Cloudant

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In July 2013, IBM acquired privately-held, cloud computing infrastructure company SoftLayer Technologies. This has proved to be just one of many strategic cloud acquisitions that IBM has made since 2007—all of which have been designed to accelerate IBM’s cloud initiatives.

Prior to IBM’s acquisition of SoftLayer, SoftLayer was basically a hosting company, observed Furrier during IBM Pulse 2014. “I think SoftLayer truly changes everything,” Mason explained. “We’ve really seen an explosion in the number of companies that are moving to SoftLayer, just in the last seven to eight months since we closed the acquisition: 2,400 new clients on SoftLayer. So that’s more than 10 percent of the entire base that SoftLayer had prior to the acquisition. So you can see real acceleration, and we expect that to continue, even further accelerating as we roll out new data centers to have 40 data centers around the world by the end of this year.”

And in February 2014, IBM announced an agreement to acquire Cloudant, a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) provider of hosted NoSQL solutions that allows developers to create next-generation mobile and Web apps.

At IBM Pulse 2014, theCUBE cohosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante asked Inhi Cho Suh, Vice President and General Manager of Big Data and Integration at IBM, about the acquisition when she stopped by theCUBE. When asked what she thought the coolest thing at IBM Pulse was, she replied that she was a little bit biased but that the announcement of the Cloudant acquisition was the coolest thing. “It’s a really exciting announcement for us,” she said, “because it’s about being present in the ways in which clients are actually developing the next generation of applications—especially to serve for mobile applications and for what they’re doing with the cloud. It’s such a unique business model.”

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Watson initiative enables paradigm shift

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When asked to comment on the paradigm shift that an initiative such as Watson brings, Mason replied, “What we’ve got right now…we’ve seen these waves of innovation…in part you’ve got these three elements coming together—cloud, mobile, social—that create massive amounts of data.”

Mason told Furrier and Vellante that what that data allows IBM to do is to be much more targeted and insightful. “There is no way we can process it with the technology from the past,” he explained. “That is where Watson comes in. There is a clear deliverable there. The goal is to make technology work easily to drive businesses forward.”

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Watch John Furrier and Dave Vellante’s entire IBM Pulse 2014 interview with John Mason, General Manager, Mid-Market at IBM:

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Photo credit: EJP Photo via photopin cc

Video interviews courtesy of theCUBE.