IBM has announced a data center in Paris for its French SoftLayer cloud customers - but the company still faces a wave of criticism after poor results this week.

The new center joins sites in London and Amsterdam, and is part of a $1.2 billlion program to build 15 new facilities round the world. It also comes during a frenzied build out of data centers in European countries, as cloud providers scramble to give users the option of data sovereignty - keeping their data in-country to meet regulations and deter snooping by intelligence operations.

Coming to your door...
“We’re addressing clients’ and countries’ growing desire for data sovereignty head on,” said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer. “With each new cloud center we’re bringing our complete cloud services portfolio to the doorsteps of local customers. The Paris cloud center allows us to support workloads and applications from French customers who want their data to stay in the country and secure in the cloud, and provides our global clients with an opportunity to get even closer to their end user customers in the region.”

The French cloud market grew from €2.2 billion in 2012, to €4.1 bn in 2014, according to French analyst firm Markess. The new IBM site will have capacity for "thousands of physical servers" and offer services including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage, and networking via IBM's private network to other SoftLayer cloud centers and network PoPs. 

Time to break up?
Despite this, IBM has faced criticism after it announced disappointing results on Monday, and unloaded its silicon business, paying GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion to take it off its hands.

Mouthy billionaire Mark Cuban slated IBM on CNBC, saying: "IBM is no longer a tech company. They have no vision. What they've evolved into is a company that does [arbitrage] on acquisitions. It's stock buybacks. Who is IBM anymore?"

IBM's share price fell seven percent on Monday after it filed its tenth successive decline in quarterly results. CEO Ginny Rometty told a conference call that IBM was taking "very bold moves", but others suggested that following HP's decision to split up, IBM should separate its services and IT businesses.