At events around the world, IBM will reveal a series of new products, services, clients and partnerships for its Blue Cloud initiative-through which IBM is collaborating to develop and test integrated cloud solutions for businesses.
· Elizabeth Arden, Nexxera, The United States Golf Association, and Indigo Bio Systems sign on as new IBM cloud computing clients; TOTVS expands cloud project with IBM
· Global Services to offer data protection software as a service through the cloud, in addition to a new IBM cloud environment for businesses to safely test applications
· New IBM software manages and secures cloud computing environments
· IBM showcases the first live demonstration of a global "overflow cloud
· IBM and Juniper Networks to install hybrid cloud capabilities across IBM's worldwide Cloud Labs for customer engagements
Built from extensive experience working with hundreds of clients in its 13 worldwide cloud centers, IBM has a cross-company portfolio of cloud computing offerings for business, such as server capacity on demand, online data protection, and Lotus e-mail and collaboration software. Analyst firm IDC predicts that cloud computing services will represent a $42 billion market by 2012;[1] IBM is announcing five new clients using its cloud computing technologies and services.
Indigo BioSystems, Inc. a privately held company offering data management and automated analysis solutions for life science researchers with a focus on the pharmaceutical industry, has recently selected IBM 's Compute on Demand cloud services to provide clients with a highly secure, scalable, and compliant environment for data exchange. As the company works to expand its presence across multiple geographies, IBM is offering resources for building and delivering high performance solutions based on a globally accessible cloud environment.
"We are pleased with our collaboration with IBM because in addition to meeting our clients' requirements for a scalable and globally accessible platform for data exchange, IBM's cloud services add the security and regulatory compliance needed to satisfy the pharmaceutical industry," said Randall K Julian, Jr. Ph.D., president, Indigo BioSystems, Inc.
Elizabeth Arden, the world's premier global beauty company, recently worked with IBM to create an innovative approach to protect business-critical information through the cloud. In engaging with IBM's Business Continuity and Resiliency Services, Elizabeth Arden has implemented a 100 percent reliable solution that assures the global restoration, recovery and resilience of its key mission-critical applications, including ERP, data warehouse email backup and archival from any BCRS recovery center, and more importantly, ensures preservation of its global brand.
Similarly, The United States Golf Association (USGA) had devoted resources to performing traditional backup and restore on its critical systems for years. The USGA's reliance on timely access to mission critical data had evolved beyond traditional backup storage procedures and proactive enhancements to their environment was sought from IBM. Today, managed services from IBM's Business Continuity and Resiliency Services organization helps deliver data protection services and a comprehensive infrastructure recovery solution for the USGA through the IBM cloud to ensure the availability and resiliency of their core business functions.
"Enterprise clients need economically compelling solutions that help them run their businesses in smarter ways, while never taking their eyes off of security, resiliency and compliance," said Erich Clementi, general manager, Enterprise Initiatives, IBM. "Cloud computing leverages many of IBM's core strengths--such as open standards, service management, scalable systems and excellence in data center operations-and gives clients the opportunity to leverage cloud computing's considerable cost advantages, while maintaining the highest levels of integrity, responsibility and control."
Last year, IBM announced Infrastructure Consulting Services for Cloud Computing, focused on helping clients identify and exploit opportunities for delivering services to their end-users from a cloud environment. Today, IBM is extending those capabilities with the launch of Infrastructure Strategy and Planning for Cloud Computing. This service is composed of a strategy workshop that brings together the business and technical teams for long-term planning and readiness assessment to leverage the full power of existing assets.
In addition to this, The IBM Design and Implementation for Cloud Test Environments allows clients to build a cloud platform within their own IT environments to safely test new applications. This test cloud environment can save clients up to 20 percent on improved provisioning time, dramatically improving service while also reducing labor costs associated with creating test environments significantly. In an enterprise, one of the most common risk factors in testing new applications is human error-but because IBM's test environment cloud is built with automation and standardization, the human error factor is minimized.
In addition to the managed security services IBM offers today, the new IBM Rational AppScan 7.8 helps companies ensure that the Web services they publish into the cloud are secure, compliant and meet business policies. Working together with the new IBM Rational AppScan OnDemand, this technology ensures that Web services are monitored on a continuous basis, providing IT managers with ongoing security analysis for applications deployed in the cloud.
Along with new security software, IBM is also announcing The Service Management Center for Cloud Computing, which contains a set of offerings that together provide clients with a platform upon which to build and deliver cloud services. The cornerstone of the Service Management Center for Cloud Computing is Tivoli Provisioning Manager 7.1 and the new Tivoli Service Automation Manager, which helps clients automate both the deployment and management of computing clouds. The IBM Service Management Center for Cloud Computing will include at least nine solutions in 2009.
Finally, IBM is revealing that it will launch a Tivoli Storage as a Service offering through its Business Continuity and Resiliency Services cloud. Beginning later in 2009, clients will be able to consume Tivoli data protection technologies via a cloud and pay for only what they use.
In a move that will continue to expand its cloud computing ecosystem, IBM will also unveil new capabilities to selected customers with IBM Business Partner, Juniper Networks, Inc. IBM and Juniper Networks will demonstrate how a hybrid cloud could allow enterprises to seamlessly extend their private clouds to remote servers in a secure public cloud, as high priority applications are given preference over the lower priority ones when resources become constrained. IBM and Juniper are installing this network capability into IBM's nine worldwide Cloud Labs for customer engagements. Once installed, IBM and Juniper could seamlessly roll client workloads from Beijing to Silicon Valley to Sao Paulo to ensure that clients never miss a service level agreement.
Nexxera is a software and services company that provides an electronic data environment among enterprises, customers and banks for business and financial transactions between firms. Nexxera acts as a hub between the elements of the value chain, providing a cloud of financial and commercial information. This replaces paper invoices, purchase orders and receipts with electronic documents shared between all parties. Nexxera now works with IBM to create an on demand, resilient, secure and scalable business infrastructure to support its business growth and global expansion.
Another client using IBM cloud solutions, TOTVS (BOVESPA: TOTS3) has expanded its ERP on-demand platform for the SMB market in Brazil and Mexico. IBM is deploying hardware infrastructure, database management, monitoring, security, availability and contingencies via the cloud. TOTVS, the second largest ERP provider in Latin America, supplies the ERP system and application support to clients. IBM and TOTVS have successfully deployed the SaaS model for its flagship product, Datasul, in Brazil where they now have thousands of SaaS users, and based on this success, the two companies partnered again to offer a second application, Microsiga Protheus, on the IBM platform to clients in Mexico.
Due to decades of technology acquisitions to fuel growing businesses, enterprises are now facing a breaking point with their IT systems. Some systems can't share information and workloads, servers are highly underutilized and the cost of energy is becoming greater than the value of the systems the energy powers. In some cases, nearly 70 percent of companies' IT budgets can be devoted to managing, maintaining, securing and upgrading systems rather than building new capabilities, services and applications. Cloud computing changes these economics dramatically.
An emerging compute model for delivering IT-related capabilities as a service, cloud computing promises dramatically better ease of use, economies of scale and much greater flexibility in sourcing and adapting to change. The technologies comprising cloud computing - virtualization, SOA, Software as a Service, request-driven provisioning - are technologies that IBM invented or is well-known for excelling in today. IBM helps its clients and partners realize these goals in three principle ways:
· IBM helps clients build their own cloud environments for internal and external use
· IBM delivers cloud services and software to be consumed by clients and partners directly
· IBM builds an ecosystem of developers, partners, vendors and universities to further cloud computing and standards adoption
According to the company, with today's announcements, IBM has the most complete set of hardware, software and services for enterprise clients to harness cloud computing for cost and efficiency benefits-while keeping their businesses secure, resilient and performing at optimal levels.
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