[amyjess]

http://softlayer.com

Surprised you haven't heard of them -- they're a pretty big player in the datacenter space. Also, I know for a fact that a good chunk of Linode's servers are actually hosted at Softlayer DCs (e.g. any Linode server hosted in Dallas is physically at Softlayer's DAL-2 location, which used to be called The Planet).

My best friend is a tech there, he joined right after the acquisition, and he tells me that the word around the office is "IBM wanted to have a good cloud business, so they bought one".

[eropple]

Yup. Between Softlayer as an IaaS provider and BlueMix as a PaaS provider, IBM has top-shelf (not the best, but close) cloud talent and tooling.

They aren't sexy, which is probably why they don't get much play on HN, but they're important and influential.