Six years after joining the infrastructure as a service race with the acquisition of Terremark Worldwide Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. is officially bowing out.

The carrier on Tuesday revealed it has sold its private cloud hosting business, the last remnant of the acquisition, to IBM Corp. for an undisclosed amount. Verizon made the news public within 24 hours of completing the sale of the 29 data centers that had formed the group’s backbone to co-location provider Equinix Inc. The deal was worth $3.6 billion, which is likely more than what IBM paid given the difference in the amount of assets changing hands.

Exiting the cloud market will enable Verizon to shift resources from fighting an uphill battle against deeply entrenched providers such as Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. to its core networking business. Its plans rely in no small part on partnerships with its former infrastructure-as-a-service rivals.

Verizon sells private network links to companies that wish to directly connect their offices with data centers operated by Amazon and Microsoft. The carrier also offers direct connectivity options to customers of IBM’s cloud platform, a relationship that will be expanded upon in the wake of the sale. Verizon stated that it intends to work with the technology giant on “a number of strategic initiatives involving networking and cloud services” but didn’t share any specifics.

As for IBM, the infrastructure included in the deal will help speed up its ambitious data center expansion footprint. The company most recently launched two pairs of cloud facilities in Houston and Washington D.C., with the set in the latter city presumably aimed at serving government clients.

Incidentally, trade publication Light Reading noted that IBM’s infrastructure-as-a-service efforts are led by John Considine, who served as the chief technology officer for Verizon’s cloud business until 2014. His familiarity with the inner workings of the division and its customers could help streamline the integration process from an organizational standpoint. 

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