IBM said today that it has generated $4 billion in new multi-year enterprise cloud business since November 1, citing new agreements with Lufthansa, WWP, Thomson Reuters, Woox Innovations, Dow Walter, ABN Amro and Thomson Reuters. IBM’s cloud business is on track to “easily exceed the $7 billion we projected for 2015,” said Moe Abulda, vice president of IBM cloud software product management in an exclusive interview with SiliconAngle. Overall, IBM said its cloud client base has doubled in the past year to more than 20,000 including not only traditional IBM clients moving to the cloud but “thousands of new customers” including enterprises, born-on-the-Web companies and startups.

IBM also announced the addition of 11 new cloud data centers to its Softlayer network. These include eight Equinix data centers that will join the network as part of a new partnership with that company and three new IBM-built data centers, in Frankfurt, Mexico City and Tokyo. The Equinix data centers are in Australia, France, Japan, Singapore, The Netherlands and the United States. This brings the total data centers on the network to 48, exceeding the 40 IBM had set as its expansion target for 2014.

“These locations are not picked at random,” Abulda said. They are driven by interest expressed by clients. For example, he said he recently talked to the CIO of an IBM Softlayer company that had planned an expansion into Great Britain timed to the opening of the IBM London data center. The advantage to customers, he said, is that they know that when they move into a new territory the new IBM Softlayer data center will have the same infrastructure stack the client already uses, and that therefore it can easily duplicate its software environment in the new location.

IBM also recently announced a partnership with Microsoft Azure to allow each company to provide its cloud software stack on the other’s cloud. Abulda said this was also in response to customer requests to both cloud providers.

Abulda said the software-as-a-service (SaaS) component of IBM’s cloud business is now on a $3 billion annual run rate and growing. He sees IBM’s BlueMix platform-as-a-service positioned for accelerated growth as users become more comfortable with the services it provides around security, compliance and other business issues. And he said he could “easily narrate 15 or more use cases” that are attracting clients to IBM’s core infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering. “We’re starting to see people move more critical workloads [to IaaS]” attracted by things like quick disaster recovery and the ability to shift workloads between environment, he said..

Hybrid cloud is driving a great deal of this growth, Abulda added. Clients who started by either moving low-priority workloads such as development and testing to Softlayer or who have been building out their own private clouds are now getting comfortable with the public cloud environment and are seeing the advantages of running core applications in a hybrid environment. IBM is also seeing a shift from end-user departments such as marketing to IT departments leading the move to hybrid cloud. “The combination of SaaS and hybrid workloads that they are designing and developing, and the fact that we can play across all three environments [SaaS, PaaS and IaaS] is one of the key reasons we’ve seen this revenue growth continue,” he said.

Graphic courtesy IBM Corp.