In what could prove to a significant blow to IBM’s cloud services, Facebook is said to be finally kicking off the migration process of its widely popular messaging platform — WhatsApp to its own data center. This will leave IBM’s cloud computing facilities hanging high and dry as one of its prominent customers will be departing the platform completely in the coming weeks.
Citing sources privy to the situation, this development was first reported by CNBC, who claims that IBM (or International Business Machines) will be losing one of its top five cloud customers (in terms of revenue) when WhatsApp breaks its long-standing ties with the software company. Big Blue is definitely going to witness a noticeable difference in its revenues in the days going forward.
The report further goes on to mention that WhatsApp was shelling out close to $2 billion per month on cloud servers to keep their messaging platform up and running, especially when its user base has now ballooned to over 1.2 billion active users. But, IBM said that the same isn’t the case and WhatsApp is presently not ranked among the top five customers of its cloud customers.
While other cloud service providers have boasted about their partnerships with major technology giants, IBM has been fairly quiet on the said front. WhatsApp is one of the most well-recognized platforms across the globe and the company did not bank upon this very fact. It only once detailed WhatsApp’s usage in an off-the-record case study, saying it runs atop around 700 high-end SoftLayer servers split between data centers in San Jose, California, and Washington, D.C.
Speaking on the same, an IBM spokesperson in a statement said:
WhatsApp has been a great client of IBM Cloud as they used our global footprint and capabilities to scale their business.
We are proud of the role of IBM Cloud in their success. It is completely natural for Facebook to seek synergies across their business.
However, this decision from the social networking giant isn’t at all surprising. Facebook has been known to keep all of its acquired platforms close to home. If you’ve already forgotten, Facebook bought out WhatsApp for a whopping $19 billion back in 2014. The two technology giants have since enhanced the feature set of their services and started sharing anonymized data with one another.
When the social media giant bought the messaging giant, the report mentions, it was in amidst the year-long migration process of the photo-sharing platform — Instagram — from AWS (Amazon Web Services) to its own data centers. Other products acquired by Facebook were initially running on IBM or Amazon’s public cloud servers, but the company acted instantly to port them to its own data farms.
As the report mentions, and is obviously true, it is only WhatsApp that has taken this long to reach the migration stage. It has been stated that Facebook didn’t want to rush any decision related to the said messaging platform because CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t want it to be under Facebook’s influence — sharing user data back and forth — just yet. Now, that’s out of the way and WhatsApp is working to expand its scope beyond the consumer-focused messaging platform to businesses as well, this decision is justified.
We have reached out to Facebook and WhatsApp for more information on the migration process and will update you once we hear back from them.
