SEOUL, South Korea, May 12, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that SK Planet, a leading Korean Information and Communications Technology (ICT) company, is expanding its overseas presence in the Turkish market on the IBM Cloud. SK Planet's mobile messenger application TicToc, built on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from SoftLayer, an IBM Company, has witnessed rapid growth, registering over 1 million customers within three months of its launch in Turkey.

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SK Planet, a wholly owned subsidiary of SK Telecom, offers a wide range of services like digital content, e-commerce advertising and marketing solutions. TicToc is a global messenger service that enables the users to easily and conveniently share their photo, video, MP3 and document files stored in their mobile phones.

Since its launch in 2011, the number of TicToc subscribers in Korea has reached 15 million. In November 2013, the service was launched in Turkey as part of the company's global expansion and the service has been rapidly growing since then.

The key to efficient mobile messenger service is low latency and service stability. TicToc needed a cloud service with high performance, high availability and lowest latency in order to provide fast and stable services. SK Planet selected SoftLayer as its cloud infrastructure provider to help optimize TicToc's fast growing international operations. SoftLayer not only has a global network and data centers in major cities but it is also the only vendor in the industry to provide bare-metal servers on demand, which perfectly supports TicToc's workload requirements.

"At SK Planet we saw an exciting opportunity in expanding our presence to a fast growing market like Turkey. We needed a technology partner that has the right capabilities to support our rapid expansion plans without compromising the customer service quality. We found a perfect match in SoftLayer's cloud solutions, which ensured that we are able to offer our service with higher speed and greater stability, as compared to competitors," said Jihyun Choi, Producer of TicToc Service at SK Planet.

SoftLayer's bare-metal technology helps secure high performance and high availability cost-effectively without directly managing data centers overseas. For TicToc service, SK Planet is using bare-metal servers at the SoftLayer Amsterdam data center and has been maintaining the TicToc service stably and seamlessly.

"TicToc's success in the Turkish market demonstrates how cloud can enable local companies to compete and grow in the global arena. SoftLayer, with its differentiated service offerings and data centers across the globe, is helping hundreds of customers expand their global footprint. It has been a fascinating to work with SK planet and be a key contributor to its global aspirations," said Seungmin Kim, SoftLayer Business Executive, IBM Korea Global Technology Service.

SK Planet's TicToc started to provide the PC version in April to enhance the convenience of users. Additionally, the new service integrated with DropBox application will be launched this month to allow easy sharing of every kind of file formats on TicToc.

About IBM Cloud Computing
IBM has helped more than 30,000 clients around the world with 40,000 industry experts. Since its acquisition in 2013, IBM SoftLayer has served 4,500 new cloud clients. Today, IBM has 100+ cloud SaaS solutions, thousands of experts with deep industry knowledge helping clients transform and a network of 40 data centers worldwide. Since 2007, IBM has invested more than $7 billion in 17 acquisitions to accelerate its cloud initiatives and build a high value cloud portfolio. IBM holds 1,560 cloud patents focused on driving innovation. In fact, IBM for the 21st consecutive year topped the annual list of US patent leaders. IBM processes more than 5.5M client transactions daily through IBM's public cloud. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/cloud. Follow us on Twitter at @IBMcloud and on our blog at http://www.thoughtsoncloud.com. Join the conversation #ibmcloud.

About SK Planet
SK Planet, established in October 2011 as a wholly owned subsidiary of SK Telecom, leads the revolution of online and mobile service platform with its Digital Contents, Integrated Commerce and Advertising & Marketing Businesses.Through its merger with SK Marketing & Company on February 2013, the new SK Planet became a truly integrated service platform that encompasses both the online and offline marketing channels.

http://www.skplanet.com/eng/

Media Contact
HwaYoung Kim
External Relations, IBM Korea
Tel: 82 2 3781 5847
Email: hykim@kr.ibm.com

Nicholas Smith
IBM Communications
978 869 0870
nssmith@us.ibm.com

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SOURCE IBM

SOURCE: IBM