GigaOm's Barb Darrow posts on IBM's acquisition of SoftLayer.

Who would have thought 7 years ago when AWS launched that they would be a threat to IBM's business model.

IBM’s acquisition of SoftLayer is a bid to make the IT giant relevant in a world where Amazon Web Services has come in from left field to snarf up workloads that IBM would very much like to own. That’s a big problem for Big Blue.

Increasingly, IBM is not just competing with age-old hardware and software rivals like Oracle and HP, but also with Amazon. Going forward, IBM will butt heads more with Google and Microsoft, which have staked big claims in public cloud infrastructure.

It is interesting to think of this as a battle between IBM's software developers and Amazon Web Service's software developers. IBM has acquired SoftLayers developers, IP and customers. When start-ups outgrew AWS the two two places almost everyone evaluates is a move to Rackspace or SoftLayer. Why the move? Many times developers want to being run on dedicated hardware.

The second major change was us moving from Amazon Web Services - EC2 and RDS in particular - to running on dedicated hardware, which we rent through Softlayer.

There's nothing wrong with AWS - indeed, we still run a staging environment there - but our database benefits greatly from the low latencies of physical disks, and there aren't very many hosted PostgreSQL services on EC2 that fit our needs.

So, consider that SoftLayer is not just Cloud.