NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Following the recent progress of its cloud computing business, IBM (IBM) - Get Report announced Wednesday its SoftLayer subsidiary has opened a second cloud data center in the Netherlands.
The new data center facility, located in Almere, will help meet the rapid growth of IBM Cloud by doubling its presence in the region, allowing for additional data storage to help with backing up and recovering data.
Shares of IBM were higher in Wednesday trading, gaining 1.21% to $165.49.
On Monday, IBM reported strong first quarter results, especially in its cloud computing business.
As part of its first-quarter earnings, IBM noted its cloud business generated $7.7 billion in revenue over the past 12 months, which would make it the largest stand-alone cloud computing business in the world.
Salesforce.com's (CRM) - Get Report total revenue for fiscal 2015 was $5.3 billion and the company expects to generate $6.5 billion in revenue in fiscal 2016.
Since IBM acquired SoftLayer in 2013, IBM's cloud initiatives and customer set has grown quite substantially. The company has opened 13 new SoftLayer data centers around the world over the last 10 months, with additional locations launching by the end of this year, the company noted.
