SoftLayer

The company's business model centered on providing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), including dedicated servers, managed hosting, and cloud computing. It differentiated itself by offering bare-metal servers on demand, a feature that appealed to clients with high-performance computing needs, such as gaming companies and, later, enterprises. This approach allowed clients direct access to hardware, bypassing the virtualization layer common among other cloud providers at the time, which translated to significant performance gains for workloads like real-time data processing. Revenue was generated by renting out these server and storage solutions to its 26,000 customers, which included both SMBs and large enterprises like WhatsApp and Macy's.

In June 2013, IBM announced its acquisition of SoftLayer for a reported sum of over $2 billion, integrating it to form the foundation of its new Cloud Services Division. This strategic move was designed to accelerate IBM's public cloud infrastructure capabilities, combining SoftLayer's agile, on-demand public cloud services with IBM's enterprise-grade private and hybrid cloud offerings. Post-acquisition, SoftLayer's offerings were expanded and integrated into the IBM Cloud (formerly Bluemix), which now includes a portfolio of over 170 services such as compute, storage, networking, analytics, and machine learning. The SoftLayer brand was eventually renamed to IBM Cloud in 2018.