New facility provides Canadian customers with local SoftLayer cloud services while keeping data in country

Continuing to expand its cloud-computing footprint in North America, IBM has announced the opening of its newest SoftLayer cloud center in Drummondville, just outside of Montréal, Québec, Canada. This is IBM's second cloud center in the country, which follows the recent opening of the Toronto facility in August 2014.

The Montréal facility is part of IBM's $1.2 billion investment to expand its global cloud services portfolio. Aligning with client preferences for keeping data in country, the new cloud center provides a second Canadian location in which local customers can store, supercompute, and back up data. This is especially important to financial institutions, public-sector organizations, and many large enterprises.

This strategic expansion will allow Québec-based organizations to achieve a new level of application performance and responsiveness by providing customers with a local facility for low-latency connections as well as the ability for in-country data redundancy in both Montréal and Toronto.

One such customer is Baseline Telematics, a world leader in "Pay As You Drive" insurance solutions. Baseline turned to IBM to help the company deliver its solution as a turnkey service to its global client base. Choosing the IBM Cloud was a key part of Baseline's international success as it has allowed them to instantly deliver their mission-critical insurance applications on an infrastructure capable of providing the reliability, speed, and efficiency required by their data-intensive "connected vehicle" applications.

"Partnering with IBM allowed us to provide identical, local and customer-specific deployments for our global clients regardless of location" said Paul-André Savoie, president and CEO, Baseline Telematics. "We chose IBM for its ease of use and 'no fail' track record. We simply won't compromise on quality, which is essential in keeping our promise of reliability to our clients—some of whom are the largest financial institutions in the world."

"As the second-largest city in Canada, Montréal is a vital center of commerce and technology," said Marc Jones, SoftLayer's CTO. "Canada is an important market for IBM Cloud services and this new facility will provide regional customers with the security, resiliency, and scalability for placing demanding workloads in the cloud."

"IBM is committed to providing enterprises with a competitive advantage that helps them transform and adapt to new trends in areas like cloud, security, big data, and mobile," said Denis Desbiens, IBM Vice President, Québec. "The local presence of SoftLayer's cloud center not only demonstrates the company's significant investment in Québec, but also its unique ability to meet the needs of Canadian customers to quickly leverage untapped business models and services with cloud."

The new cloud center offers the full-range of SoftLayer and IBM Cloud infrastructure services, including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage, security services and networking. These services can be deployed on-demand with full remote access and control through a customer Web portal or API, allowing customers to create their ideal public, private or hybrid cloud environments.

IBM continues to grow its market share in the cloud space and aims to accelerate its leadership in the $80 billion hybrid cloud marketplace. Over the last four months and as part of IBM's initial $1.2 billion dollar investment in cloud services, IBM will have opened five SoftLayer cloud centers, including facilities in Frankfurt, Germany; Querétaro, Mexico; and Tokyo, Japan. The opening of the Québec-based facility is one of two recently announced centers that will help broaden the company's cloud footprint. IBM has also committed to opening cloud centers in Milan, Italy and Chennai, India before the year is out. This joins similar hubs launched last year in Toronto, Hong Kong, London, Dallas, and Washington, D.C.

For more information about the Montréal data center, visit http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/ca/en/softlayer.html. For more information about SoftLayer's cloud centers, visit http://www.softlayer.com/datacenters.

Baseline Telematics is a world leading insurance telematics provider, ranked in the top 5 by the Ptolemus group in 2013. For more information on Baseline, visit www.baselinetelematics.com.