IBM has opened its first data center built with a chunk of its $1.2bn investment - announced earlier this year – in Hong Kong.

The SoftLayer facility is the first facility out of 15 proposed to be built to meet growing customer demand for cloud-based IT services.

SoftLayer was acquired by IBM last July and is now the foundation for IBM’s cloud portfolio.

IBM Watson will be available in the Hong Kong facility making it only one of three facilities to provide the business intelligence engine- the other facilities to provide Watson are in London and Dallas.

IBM’s BlueMix platform-as-a-service on Softlayer will also be available from the Hong Kong site.

BlueMix is an implementation of IBM’s Open Cloud Architecture, leveraging Cloud Foundry to enable developers to rapidly build, deploy, and manage their cloud applications, while tapping a growing ecosystem of available services and runtime frameworks.

IBM said it will follow flexible pricing schemes as it deploys BlueMix, allowing customers to consume it by the hour, by the month, or by the seat.

SoftLayer provide on-demand cloud infrastructure that includes bare metal and virtual servers, storage and networking all on a single platform, with full customer access and control.

The enterprise-grade components will give users the ability to create public, private and hybrid clouds capable of supporting demanding applications and workloads.

SoftLayer’s Hong Kong facility will have the capacity for more than 15,000 physical servers and the trademark SoftLayer network of networks architecture.

This will add to an existing Asia footprint that already includes the Singapore data center and network Points of Presence in Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo.

SoftLayer’s CEO Lance Crosby said the facility will give Hong Kong’s entrepreneurial businesses a local cloud facility to tap into.

“Our expansion into Hong Kong gives us a stronger Asian market presence as well as added proximity and access to our growing customer base in region,” Crosby said.