Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

IBM’s Cloud Is Big in Japan With Two New Data Centers

Computing and services giant IBM has boosted its cloud computing offerings in Japan with the opening of two data centers in that country, the company will announce today.

The first is located in Makuhari, Japan, and will be devoted to IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise service. This is the cloud service that IBM announced in April, and which is aimed at big enterprises that delivers a mix of public and private services. I talked with Ric Telford, VP for cloud services, about SmartCloud the day after it launched.

It’s the sixth data center for IBM’s SmartCloud. In March, it said it would spend $38 million to build a data center in Singapore. Others are in Germany, Canada, and the United States. For its part, Amazon switched on a data center in Japan in March, though at last count it had five data centers around the world. (Anyway, who’s counting?)

IBM also announced that later this year it will open a second new data center in Japan, this one devoted to LotusLive, its online messaging, social collaboration and meetings software, which is a rival of sorts to Microsoft’s Exchange and Office 365 as well as Google Apps. Among other things it will offer services to Japanese companies who for legal or other reasons aren’t allowed to host their data outside the country. One big client, I’m told, is the electronics company Panasonic.

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

When AllThingsD began, we told readers we were aiming to present a fusion of new-media timeliness and energy with old-media standards for quality and ethics. And we hope you agree that we’ve done that.

— Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, in their farewell D post