IBM pumps cash into clouds

The money will be spent primarily on a new data center in North Carolina. Big Blue will renovate a building in its Research Triangle Park campus to house the new data center, which will become part of IBM's larger cloud computing network.

The data center will be modeled after IBM's facility in Boulder, Colorado. That datacenter featured designs aimed at cutting down energy consumption and allowing for easy scaling of systems.

Also part of the network will be a new cloud center in Tokyo. The recently-launched data center serves as one of eight cloud computing facilities IBM operates throughout the world.

The company hopes that the cloud program will allow for expansion of the field to everyday business, allowing for companies to obtain computing power on-demand rather than purchase new IT hardware.

"Cloud computing is fundamentally about re-engineering the world's computing infrastructure, to enable game-changing. even life-changing. applications," declared Willy Chiu, IBM's vice president of high performance on demand solutions.

"To IBM, cloud computing is much more than the normal evolution of a data center."