The future of SoftLayer is bright. And it’s Bluemix.

Since the founding of SoftLayer in May of 2005, our motto has been “Innovate or Die.” Over the past decade, our business has grown exponentially and evolved to meet the needs of our customers and seize opportunities in the marketplace. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Today, we’re excited to share the next big step in SoftLayer’s evolution as part of the IBM Cloud portfolio: IBM Bluemix is integrating SoftLayer products and services into its vast catalog of infrastructure, platform, and application services!

The SoftLayer products, services, tools, systems, and support you know and love will become a cornerstone of a unified Bluemix cloud experience that delivers the performance, flexibility, and consistency of SoftLayer infrastructure alongside the extensive catalog of cloud resources that include IBM Watson services, development runtimes, containers, database services, and more.

But enough of the fluff. What does this mean to you as a SoftLayer customer?

In the coming days, weeks, and months, you’ll start SoftLayer integrated more tightly into the Bluemix cloud platform, and with this integration, we’re bringing all of our cloud platform offerings under the Bluemix brand.

The most important thing to remember about this transition is that all of the SoftLayer systems, products, services, and support you know and love will remain in place as fundamental building blocks upon which the broader Bluemix catalog will be built.

Bluemix will be consistent with your SoftLayer experience:

• For the next few months, all SoftLayer offerings will be available on both SoftLayer.com and IBM.com/Bluemix—which means you can order identical products and services on either site, and they’ll be deployed in the same data centers and managed in the same systems.
• You still have access the your SoftLayer control portal to manage your cloud infrastructure environment.
• The support teams for all platforms will remain exactly the same.

While our team places a high priority on preserving the SoftLayer customer experience, the opportunities available as a result of this integration into Bluemix are what we’re most excited about:

• The SoftLayer control portal has been integrated into the Bluemix console to allow for a single dashboard to manage infrastructure and cloud services.
• By linking your SoftLayer account to a Bluemix account, you’ll receive one invoice for all of your infrastructure and services.
• The full catalog of Bluemix products and services is available for you to integrate into your own apps and systems, letting you do what you do better and more efficiently.

You may have seen a service notification about the availability of IBMid single sign-on authentication for your SoftLayer account, and we’re happy to announce that customers have the ability to link SoftLayer and Bluemix accounts as well.

So, what can you do now?

Well, you can keep doing what you’ve always done—we were intentional about making that possible. But if you want to take a more proactive approach to learning about what the future of SoftLayer looks like in Bluemix, we recommend heading over to the Bluemix homepage so you can see how our infrastructure offerings—like bare metal servers, virtual servers, cloud storage, security, and network products—are integrated into Bluemix.

And while you’re there, you can learn about some of the cool things you can do with Bluemix, like:

• Optimize campaigns in real-time based on customer reactions using Watson Personality Insights.
• Improve outcomes with Watson Alchemy API and Retrieve and Rank paired with high performance bare metal servers.
• Securely store, analyze, and process your big data using database services with Apache Spark.

As we transition SoftLayer fully into Bluemix, please follow us over to the IBM Bluemix Blog to keep up with the latest announcements, news, and product information about your Bluemix infrastructure.

Innovate or Die.

-Kevin