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Press Release

Technology Companies Select SoftLayer over Competition for Internet-Scale Cloud Infrastructure

AppFirst, Cloudant and Struq Turn to SoftLayer for Flexible Architecture, High-Performance Network & Unmatched Automation

Dallas—July 24, 2012—Today’s hottest tech companies are relying on SoftLayer Technologies, a leading provider of global cloud infrastructure, to achieve the scalability, performance and the time-to-market they require. Companies like AppFirst, Cloudant and Struq are turning to SoftLayer to rapidly develop and build-out their online services, because the company delivers a flexible Internet-scale platform that meshes virtualized and physical resources, all available in real time, on demand.

“Confusing pricing schemes, long term lock-in contracts and performance bottlenecks were pretty much all we saw when we contracted with other big cloud providers,” said David Roth, CEO of AppFirst. “Our solution is constantly streaming data from thousands of servers residing in more than 70 countries worldwide and we can’t afford a sub-standard platform. SoftLayer invested in what we needed most – amazing automation that allows us to be in control and no long-term contract or exorbitant prices. SoftLayer delivers a top-notch solution for business like ours, running on both virtual and physical servers, delivering a best-in-class networking infrastructure.”

As a leading provider of critical business and system visibility solutions, AppFirst initially tried two other cloud providers to launch its infrastructure, but quickly learned that both lacked what the company needed to successfully support its solution. Unpredictable costs and dramatic performance fluctuations – along with the inability to customize the platform the way they needed – led AppFirst to make the transition to SoftLayer. The move has saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars and has been a key factor in delivering the best solution to its customers.

Cloudant and Struq also found that moving to SoftLayer provided performance, rapid deployment and other competitive advantages for their big data needs that commodity cloud providers couldn’t match.

“We measured latencies for different data centers run by other cloud providers, and it’s no contest: SoftLayer provides the lowest and most predictable latencies. Data centers that are thousands of miles apart perform almost as if they are on the same local area network,” said Mike Miller, co-founder & chief scientist at Cloudant, provider of the world’s first globally distributed “data layer as a service” for loading, storing, analyzing, and distributing application data. “With SoftLayer, we have transparency into our infrastructure, so we can tweak our systems to attain optimal performance.”

Struq, an ad personalization company that depends on the rapid analysis of advertising data, found that other cloud providers could not provision servers fast enough to meet its needs. Its previous cloud provider took 10 days to deploy physical servers, severely limiting Struq’s ability to meet customer demand. Thanks to SoftLayer, Struq is able to provision servers directly through its portal and have them up and running in hours.

“Companies trying to scale out their online services quickly run into challenges that require a broad set of tools for managing and automating both physical and virtual IT resources,” said Duke Skarda, chief technology officer at SoftLayer. “The flexibility of SoftLayer’s platform enables these companies to take a hybrid approach to their cloud infrastructure needs. We make it possible for them to quickly deploy servers and storage across our global network of data centers and achieve the low latency communications they require to support their customers.”

About SoftLayer Technologies

SoftLayer operates a global cloud infrastructure platform built for Internet scale. Spanning 13 data centers in the United States, Asia and Europe and a global footprint of network points of presence, SoftLayer’s modular architecture provides unparalleled performance and control, with a full-featured API and sophisticated automation controlling a flexible unified platform that seamlessly spans physical and virtual devices, and a global network for secure, low-latency communications. With 100,000 devices under management, SoftLayer is the largest privately held Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider in the world with a portfolio of leading-edge customers from Web startups to global enterprises. For more information, please visit softlayer.com.

Contact:
Andre Fuochi
Director, Corporate Communications
469.394.7274
afuochi@softlayer.com

2012 Press Releases