Softlayer was great. IBM Cloud is terrible. I tried provisioning a bare metal server a few months ago and gave up a couple hours in. Packet had me up and running in minutes.
Cover your ass. If you're in a position to spend a lot of money, and you hire IBM, and they mess it up, you get to say "Hey, I did my due diligence by hiring IBM".
Except there is now a counter-current where the project fails due to IBM and people would say “what did you expect, you hired IBM” (e.g. some huge government software projects).
well if you are a member of any of their large user groups you would be asking why has IBM forsaken them? They really went off the rails in a bad way seeming to have forgotten their hardware base in z, i, and even p, to where you had to look long and hard to find mention of any of those platforms during announcements.
Going to have to wait and see if IBM changes direction but last year wasn't fun as they began the shutdown of their developerworks wikis that had so much user contributed material and this change came out of the blue with little warning. that left even groups in IBM struggling to preserve knowledge built up over the years
