IBM comments on buying Softlayer

GigaOm’s Derrick Harris has a post on IBM and the acquisition of Softlayer.

On buying SoftLayer for $2 billion

“[W]e bought a company. … I’ve bought 120 companies,” Mills said matter of factly, noting that in this case IBM realized it wasn’t capturing certain segments of the cloud market and wasn’t delivering certain capabilities that customers wanted. You can either build those capabilities or buy them, he added, and “at the end of the day you run out of money [to build everything].”

Mills did defend IBM’s cloud legacy, though, going back to then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt calling IBM in 2006 and asking if it would help set up a web-accessible developer cloud “because we had dynamic provisioning and scheduling technology and they did not.”