IBM has opened its first German data center designed specifically to serve the SoftLayer cloud.

The company’s latest facility is located in Frankfurt, aiming to help customers remain compliant with Germany’s notoriously strict data protection and sovereignty laws. It will also improve latency for SoftLayer services across Europe.

The project is part of an ongoing global expansion that will see the company build a total of 15 data centers. As with the rest of the new SoftLayer sites, customers have the option to test cloud services from Frankfurt for a month before signing any contracts.

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Last year, IBM announced plans to spend US$1.2 billion on infrastructure in order to support the growth of SoftLayer – a cloud provider it acquired for $2 billion in 2013. The additional data centers will bring the total number of SoftLayer facilities to 40.

These plans obviously included Germany – according to the Experton Group, the value of the German cloud market is set to reach €18 billion by 2017.

The data center in Frankfurt follows IBM’s standardized pod design and offers a full range of cloud services including bare metal and virtual servers, storage, security and networking. The company says 10Gbps connections between SoftLayer sites help transfer data to Amsterdam in just seven milliseconds. The average latency for data exchange with other SoftLayer data centers stands at 330 milliseconds.

“While all our cloud data centers have SoftLayer’s same strict standards for security and privacy, the new Frankfurt facility will allow German companies and clients to benefit from in-country data storage, a requirement in many industries to comply with German data protection laws,” said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer.

The new site also broadens redundancy options, with customers able to back up their data to any SoftLayer data center in the world.

For a limited time, IBM is offering up to $500.00 off new orders for the Frankfurt data center for the first month of service.

IBM’s global expansion has already seen new facilities open in Paris, London, Melbourne, Toronto, Hong Kong and Mexico City. Earlier this month, the company launched its first SoftLayer data center in Japan, where it says its cloud business grew 600 percent in 2014.

There are confirmed plans for further sites in Washington DC, Dallas, Montreal, Sydney, Sao Paolo, Dubai, Shanghai and an unspecified location in India. Rumors about a new build in Seoul, South Korea, haven’t been confirmed.

Despite thiss, things at IBM have been looking somewhat bleak: in October, the company reported its tenth successive decline in quarterly results, despite assurances by CEO Ginny Rometty that it is making “very bold moves”.

These include the sale of IBM’s x86 server business to Lenovo, and disposing of its loss-making silicon manufacturing operation to GlobalFoundries – an entity created by the Emirate of Abu Dhabi in 2009 to take over the AMD factories.