IBM is planning to launch a new data center in Singapore to support delivery of its cloud services. The US$38m facility is due to launch in April with cloud-based infrastructure and software services.

The data center will become part of IBM's integrated global cloud-delivery network, comprised of data centers in Germany, Canada and the US. The network also includes 13 labs, seven of which are in the Asia-Pacific region: China, India, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore.

Paul Moung, VP of cloud computing at IBM's Growth Markets division, said the company was focused on providing a wide variety of cloud services.

"The new [data] center furthers IBM's focus on the delivery of cloud services and technology for both public and private clouds, giving clients the best available set of options to achieve their infrastructure ambitions," he said.

By continuing its expansion in the Asia-Pacific region, IBM is looking to capitalize on massive growth in demand for IT services ÔÇô particularly cloud ÔÇô expected to occur there over the next several years.

IDC has forecasted the Asia-Pacific cloud market to grow about 40% every year on average for the next three years, reaching $4.9bn by 2014. The continuing build-out of data centers in the region to support cloud services has been a key driver of this growth, addressing performance, latency and data-location concerns that have hampered market growth in the past.

IBM has high hopes for the worldwide cloud-computing market. The company's CEO Sam Palmisano said at a recent investor meeting that it expected to generate about $7bn in revenue from cloud-related offerings in 2015, according to a report by The Street.

On 7 March IBM announced the opening of its 30th branch office in the Chinese City of Hohhot in the Inner Mongolia region. The company said this particular region has grown in strategic importance along with growth of the Chinese economy, serving as an important link with both Mongolia and Russia.

IBM will kick off service-delivery supported by the new Singapore data center with Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service offerings. The company says enterprise-class virtual servers available through the IaaS product will be well suited for test and development and "other dynamic workloads."

The SaaS products will include multiple IBM Software Group products, as well as products from partner companies. SaaS payment models will be designed for mid-size firms, large enterprises and independent software vendors.