IBM Thursday said that it's opening two new cloud data centers in Japan, one to deliver its SmartCloud services - that's its public cloud - and the other dedicated to delivering LotusLive, its cloud collaboration widgetry.

The new facilities mean it's added to the sites in Singapore, Germany, Canada and the United States delivering SmartCloud services and its 13 global cloud labs, seven of which are in Asia-Pacific, specifically in China, India, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore.

The fact that they're in Asia is important to IBM's five-year growth plan and the $7 billion bogey it set for cloud revenues.

IBM figures its jumping into the public cloud market in Japan is a positive post-disaster business story.

It says its new Cloud Data Center in Makuhari, Japan, will deliver SmartCloud enterprise services and run diverse workloads across multiple delivery methods including both public and private infrastructure.

For the first time enterprise clients in Japan will be able to select key characteristics of a public, private or hybrid cloud to match workload requirements along five dimensions: security and isolation; availability and performance; technology platforms; management support and deployment; and payment and billing.

The LotusLive facility won't open until later this year.

IBM says the Japanese LotusLive center will let clients who can't take their data outside the country due to security and regulatory compliance work in a "security-rich" cloud environment.