IBM has expanded one of its European datacentres to host SmartCloud services, with the aim of better serving the needs of customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa with its social business technologies.

Based in Germany, the upgraded datacentre will help the firm to expand its IBM SmartCloud for Social Business services, which it claims there is growing demand for among enterprise customers.

“With the new European datacentre, we expand our industry-leading social business footprint, strengthening our ability to meet the needs for businesses seeking security-rich, flexible cloud environments that let them unleash innovation and drive a smarter enterprise,” said Alistair Rennie, general manager for social business at IBM.

The firm said the datacentre addition will enable it to tailor solutions to meet each customer’s needs, using public or private cloud deployment models, or a mixture of the two.

For customers, one advantage of the upgrade is that their data is physically held in a European location, rather than one of IBM’s US datacentres.

Its social tools enable employees to build collaborative networks in real time, both internally and externally, which can improve the speed of marketing and sales processes, according to IBM.

These include IBM Notes and Domino Social Edition 9, introduced last month, and SmartCloud Docs, a cloud-based office productivity suite, unveiled at the end of last year.