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IBM Raises the Bar to Meet Burgeoning Cloud Demand in the Channel

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New offerings designed to put Business Partners on a fast track to seize the cloud opportunity.

IBM has launched a comprehensive set of capabilities to empower Business Partners of all types to quickly adopt innovative cloud business models and generate new revenue streams by offering public, private, and hybrid cloud infrastructures, applications, and services to their clients.

IBM is making a significant commitment to the Business Partner community to help them quickly ramp up and participate in the industry shift to cloud computing, a market opportunity that will grow from $96 billion in 2011 to $219 billion by 2015,* according to IBM. This effort will enable Business Partners to build new solutions that take advantage of IBM's cloud services and help clients make the most of their IT investments, the company says.

IBM is offering new software and services specifically designed for Business Partners through public or private clouds based on their business needs.

To help a range of companies, including Business Partners, independent software vendors (ISVs), system integrators, telecommunication companies and many other industry-specific businesses prepare to deliver their enterprise solutions as cloud services, IBM is extending the IBM SmartCloud portfolio with two new public cloud services. The new services include the following:

  • SmartCloud Enterprise+ will provide an enterprise class Infrastructure-as-a-Service including enterprise class governance, administration and management control, multiple security and isolation options built into the virtual infrastructure and network and real business-centric SLAs that align IBM accountability to your business. Additionally, IBM intends to make SCE+ available to qualified IBM Business Partners for resell in the first half of 2012.
  • SmartCloud Application Services will quickly enable enterprise applications as a cloud service using a set of secure and flexible tools. Interested ISVs can join the SmartCloud Application Service beta program. IBM is also announcing key enhancements to the existing IBM SmartCloud including a white label option for business partners to launch branded services based on SmartCloud Enterprise.

IBM is also launching SmartCloud Foundation, a family of private cloud solutions to help clients of all sizes to quickly and easily design and deploy private cloud environments. The new private cloud offerings will be specifically targeted to small and medium businesses. Business partners can access the offerings via IBM PartnerWorld channel reseller programs.

  • IBM SmartCloud Entry solution, delivered by IBM Starter Kit for Cloud, offers the building blocks to create private clouds on virtualized IBM System x and Power Systems hardware. The solution provides simplified initialization and administration for cloud environments on Power and x86 systems, standardization of virtual machines, and improved operations productivity with an easy-to-use, self-service interface. Organizations can also quickly and easily scale to more advanced cloud solutions as business demands and workloads increase.
  • IBM SmartCloud Provisioning software offers a powerful provisioning engine and image management system to dynamically create or provision virtual machines. The software can create hundreds of virtual machines in less than a minutes and scale to more than 4,000 virtual machines in less than an hour.
  • IBM SmartCloud Monitoring applies its industry-leading monitoring expertise to provide greater visibility into the performance of virtual and physical environments: storage, network and server resources.

In addition, to help companies analyze their cloud readiness and identify key challenges they may need to address before moving forward with their cloud solutions, IBM is offering a Cloud Assessment tool. This no-charge tool is available through www.ibm.com/cloud helps IBM independent software vendors get ready to transform their business model with cloud.

IBM is also offering a variety of ways for Business Partners to gain access to cloud technologies and expertise. Across its network of global cloud labs and 40 IBM Innovation Centers in 33 countries, IBM offers hands-on technical expertise in building cloud skills, delivering cloud workshops and providing access to new training programs to partners.

"We are committed to the success of our Business Partners and our goal is to continue to collaborate with them to bring innovative solutions to our joint clients across industries," said Rich Hume, general manager, IBM Global Business Partners. "To seize this opportunity, IBM has laid the foundation for a comprehensive set of cloud offerings which IBM Business Partners, who are key to our growth strategy, can take to market to help these clients address their cloud needs as their businesses grow."

IBM and CohesiveFT are piloting a program that is focused on providing enterprise application migration to the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise (SCE) environment. CohesiveFT offers a cloud convergence platform, the Elastic Server Cloud Container, allowing its users to deploy applications to a set of abstractions around image automation, topology automation, and network virtualization to facilitate the migration from datacenter to cloud, cloud segment to cloud segment, or cloud to cloud. Cohesive FT is now making available the CohesiveFT Elastic Server Cloud Container to IBM SCE users, allowing them to import their virtualized workloads to the IBM Cloud.

Clinical & Management Solutions (CMS) turned to IBM Business Partner Corent Technology to enable the industry’s first comprehensive, multi-tenant Software as a Service (SaaS) solution for home healthcare market. With the help of Corent and the IBM SmartCloud, CMS is now able to automate home healthcare agencies’ costly and burdensome administrative and clinical documentation, billing, scheduling, and regulatory compliance tasks, through their SaaS offering resulting in enhanced efficiency. This new cloud solution has helped Clinical & Management Solutions save time, money and has raised the bar for ease and speed of onboarding of healthcare providers.

"Corent is at the core of our Clinical Management application, enabling us to provide an efficient and secure healthcare SaaS solution." said Rommel Badua, CEO of Clinical & Management Solutions, Inc. “Running on the IBM Smart Cloud not only provides the quality of service our solution requires, but also provides the comfort and the confidence our customers demand.”

IBM is also announcing a collaboration with SugarCRM to make its products available on the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise. AMI Partners forecasts that in the U.S. alone, the SMB Cloud CRM market will triple by 2015.

Through this integration, clients can now take advantage of advanced CRM solutions, deployable in a matter of minutes, while achieving all the benefits of a private cloud environment. Sugar 6, the first CRM application available on IBM SmartCloud, enables businesses across all industries to achieve greater visibility into sales, marketing and support to deliver the optimal customer experience. Sugar on IBM SmartCloud Enterprise combines SaaS with IBM's world-class infrastructure, service and support and also offers seamless integration with other valuable IBM SmartCloud offerings such as collaboration and analytics capabilities. This provides businesses with the necessary tools and options they need to optimize and automate their businesses for growth.

Customers today are rethinking the way they approach CRM and are leveraging the cloud to gain faster access to sales reports and data, as well as analytical tools to evaluate sales performance.

SugarCRM applications are available on IBM SmartCloud today.

Highland Solutions, a SugarCRM Value Added Reseller and an IBM Business Partner, is already working with a variety of clients including Hi-Way Equipment, a company that sells, services and rents heavy machinery. The company was looking for a way to scale its infrastructure to accommodate future needs. With Sugar on the IBM SmartCloud, getting Hi-Way Equipment’s deployment up-and-running was simple, and over time, they will see reductions in operating costs.

IBM has helped thousands of clients adopt cloud models and manages millions of cloud based transactions every day. IBM assists clients in areas as diverse as banking, communications, healthcare and government to build their own clouds or securely tap into IBM cloud-based business and infrastructure services. IBM is unique in bringing together key cloud technologies, deep process knowledge, a broad portfolio of cloud solutions, and a network of global delivery centers. For more information about IBM cloud solutions, visit www.ibm.com/smartcloud. Follow the company on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ibmcloud and on our blog at www.thoughtsoncloud.com.

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*IBM Market Development & Insights

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