Forecast for China computing: increasing Cloud
Like guests at a Chinese banquet, software companies in an industrial park in Wuxi, China, will select just the computing resources they want when IBM builds its Cloud Computing Center there. This is the first such center for the Middle Kingdom.
In traditional technology, each of the dozens of software firms would have its own hardware and software. In cloud computing, large pools of systems are linked to provide IT services. Cloud computing allows data centers to operate more like the Internet with computing resources accessed and shared virtually. As a result, the Chinese companies will be able to access the services at any time — just as they use utilities such as water and electricity.
One of the software companies in the park, iSoftStone, plans to develop account settlement software for the financial services industry.
"The China Cloud Computing Center represents a milestone in service-oriented computing," said T. W. Liu, the chairman and CEO of iSoftStone. "It will allow companies in the Wuxi Software Park to leapfrog to the newest computing models and will provide an efficient IT platform for software development."
The center in WuXi will use IBM's "Blue Cloud" technologies, a series of cloud computing offerings based on open standards and open source software which link computers to deliver such Web 2.0 capabilities as mashups, open collaboration, social networking and mobile commerce.
IBM has a significant research and development presence in China with more than 3,200 IBM engineers and scientists employed by IBM labs in Beijing and Shanghai.