IBM to fold SoftLayer into Bluemix

IBM will blend its Bluemix platform-as-a-service offering with its SoftLayer bare metal cloud servers infrastructure-as-a-service from now following customer feedback for less complexity.

Customers will be able to use a single IBMid login to manage both BlueMix and SoftLayer assets from the same console and be billed for both services on the same invoice, starting this month.

On top of the current services available on the Cloud Foundry-based Bluemix platform - such as Watson artificial intelligence, the Apple Swift programming framework development sandbox, application runtimes, virtual servers, object storage and compute services - customers will now also be able to configure and launch bare metal servers.

Bluemix itself runs on SoftLayer infrastructure, and IBM started the process of merging the two into an integrated cloud platform in June this year.

The transition won't be immediate; IBM the company was taking things slowly and will leave the softlayer.com site up for the time being.

In 2013, IBM closed its SmartCloud enterprise public cloud after only two years of operation. The company migrated customers to SoftLayer, which it bought in 2013 for US$2 billion.