IBM yesterday announced that it will open a new SoftLayer data center in London this month as part of the $1.2B the company is plowing into its SoftLayer Cloud Services infrastructure this year.  IBM ultimately plans to add 40 data centers across five continents.

SoftLayer’s new London data center will house more than 15,000 physical servers and will offer all of SoftLayer’s cloud infrastructure services including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage and networking. “We already have a large customer base in London and the region,” said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer, in a statement.

The investment comes as IBM celebrates the first anniversary of its acquisition of SoftLayer,  witches since become the foundation of its newly created IBM Cloud Services division within its Global Services unit. SoftLayer continues to operate as a separate business entity inside IBM Cloud Services. “I think [SoftLayer] was the most transformative, single acquisition that IBM has done,” remarked Holger Mueller, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, to theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Paul Gillin at IBM Impact in April 2014.

IBM had announced its intention to invest in SoftLayer expansion in January, with data centers targeted for North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. As predicted by Wikibon Chief Analyst Dave Vellante in a SiliconANGLE interview, IBM’s SoftLayer platform has become a “real growth engine” for IBM Cloud Services. It’s also a much-needed one as IBM finds itself still playing catch-up to public cloud service provider Amazon Web Services, which started the public cloud race. .

Watch Holger Mueller of Constellation Research as he discusses IBM SoftLayer with theCUBE cohosts John Furrier and Paul Gillin at IBM Impact in April 2014:

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Image courtesy of IBM.

Video interview with Holger Mueller courtesy of theCUBE.