In a bid to get more customers to use SoftLayer Technologies Inc, International Business Machines Corp or IBM is growing its cloud services platform, hoping that the business will help the Armonk, New York-based firm turn around seven quarters of declining sales, Bloomberg reported.

IBM's Next Generation Platform Chief Technology Officer Danny Sabbah told Bloomberg that they are making the setting up and adjustment of applications in the cloud less complicated. The company intends to ramp up its spending for cloud software development, with plans to allocate over $1 billion for the project through next year, representing a double-digit percentage increase compared to the past couple of years, the report said.

IBM had bought SoftLayer last year in a deal worth $2 billion. Last month, IBM further committed $1.2 billion for 15 new data centers to its acquisition. With the latest development, IBM has increased its bet on the cloud services provider. IBM's falling revenue is also partly due to falling demand for hardware as clients become more dependent on the cloud instead of having to purchase their own servers, the report said.

Sabbah added, "This is crucial to expanding the potential audience and helping them get benefit and value from using SoftLayer. This is not just about IBM's conventional enterprise customers. There will be a lot of emerging companies in different areas."

The increased investment in SoftLayer also highlights its position as one of the largest bet that IBM has made in the cloud services space as it squares off with such rivals as Amazon.com Inc, the report said.

By adding new capabilities to SoftLayer, IBM hopes to lure more industries to the platform and not just the bank and insurance firms that currently utilize its cloud products. They have added BlueMix, an open-source enterprise software portfolio that intends to assist developers as they create applications on IBM's cloud infrastructure, the report said.