News

HONG KONG – AUGUST 4, 2009 – IBM today introduced to Hong Kong the industry’s first set of commercial “cloud” services and integrated products for the enterprise. Based on nearly two years of research and hundreds of client engagements, the IBM Smart Business cloud portfolio will bring sophisticated automation technology and self-service to specific digital tasks, to turn complex business processes into simple services.

These offerings will also be aimed at helping clients deal with a new flood of transactions and data coming from a billion connected people and a trillion connected devices in today’s connected world, the entirely new kinds of tasks involved and the colossal data burdens facing corporate data centers.

“Cloud is an important new consumption and delivery model for IT and business services. Enterprises want to capitalize on what this model offers in a way that is safe, reliable and efficient for business,” said Tony Fung, Executive, Global Technology Services, IBM China/Hong Kong Limited. “The Smart Business cloud portfolio is IBM’s single, organized response to clients’ needs. We are hardening our best practices into a formal, cross-company portfolio of cloud computing offerings.”

The IBM Smart Business portfolio includes three “on-ramps,” or ways to quickly deploy the cloud model:

• Smart Business standardized services on the IBM Cloud (preview);
• Smart Business private cloud services behind the firewall built by IBM (run by IBM or the client);
• and IBM CloudBurst service delivery platform, for clients who want to build to their own cloud with pre-integrated hardware and software.

All three offerings include IBM’s service management system – a kind of air traffic control system for IT – that automates self-service, provisioning, monitoring as well as managing access and security for the cloud.

IBM’s portfolio of offerings helps clients standardize IT and business services by type of work and function. The first offerings are optimized for two areas: development and test and virtualized desktops.

IBM Smart Business: Software Development & Test

In many organizations software developers are fast becoming the nucleus of innovation, as they build the services and capabilities that will underlie future revenue and generate opportunity. In fact, the average enterprise devotes 30 to 50 percent of its entire technology infrastructure to development and test, but typically up to 90 percent of it remains idle.⁽¹⁾

In addition to high cost and low utilization rates, today software developers lose a massive amount of time and productivity getting permissions and access to the systems and tools they need to do their jobs. IBM has seen that safely enabling developers to serve themselves can help reduce IT labor costs by 50 percent, reduce provision cycle times from weeks to minutes and improve quality, eliminating software defects by up to 30 percent.⁽²⁾

IBM will offer clients two choices to deploy development and test cloud services:

• IBM Smart Business Test Cloud: Private cloud services, behind the client’s firewall, built and/or run by IBM
• IBM CloudBurst: a family of pre-integrated hardware, storage, virtualization and networking, with a sophisticated service management system built-in

These two offerings have been tested and proven by South African financial institution Nedbank and China’s Sinochem, a Fortune 500 company respectively.

IBM Smart Business: Virtual Desktops
IBM’s clients have also successfully leveraged cloud computing to virtualize desktops. Using up to 73 percent less power than traditional desktops and laptops, server-enabled virtualized desktops deliver a better end-user experience and can be more efficiently managed.⁽³⁾ Based on IBM internal data from client engagements, these solutions can also lower end-user IT support costs by up to 40 percent over traditional desktop environments.

IBM will offer IBM Smart Business Desktop Cloud, cloud services delivered via the client’s own infrastructure and data center, to help clients virtualize desktops.

Pike County Schools System in Eastern Kentucky, the US, has achieved a reduction of over 62 percent of end-user support costs while enabling the introduction of new courseware across 27 schools instantly.

IT Gets “Smarter” with Built-in Service Management System
Service management is the operating system of the 21rst century, orchestrating thousands of processes and services from physical and digital sources across the world. What the operating system was for the PC era, the service management system will be for IT and business services in the cloud.

Everyday 15 petabytes of new information is generated – more than eight times the information stored in all the libraries in the United States. By 2012, the digital universe will be 5 times the size it was in 2008. While 70 percent or more of the digital universe is created, captured or replicated by individuals, enterprises, at some point in time, have responsibility or liability for 85 percent of it – including security, privacy, reliability and compliance.⁽⁴⁾

IBM has focused much of its investment – through acquisitions and in research and development – to build its service management capabilities. It develops smarter control and automation technologies for traditional IT as well as the trillion physical devices connected to data centers.

IBM Smart Business private cloud services for development & test as well as virtual desktops are available today, while IBM CloudBurst will be available in October.

For more information on IBM’s cloud computing portfolio, research and labs please visit: ibm.com/cloud (US).

For information about how IBM is helping clients usher in a smarter planet, please visit ibm.com/think (US).

Appendix: A Smarter Planet Covered By Clouds

South African financial institution Nedbank is automating business processes through cloud technology. "IBM cloud technology has proved to us that we can shorten [business process automation environment deployment] provisioning time significantly, reduce our cost and also increase the agility with which we can respond to business demands," said Nicholas Parry, Nedbank.

With IBM Smart Business Virtual Desktop, Pike County School District in Eastern Kentucky has reduced end-user support costs more than 62 percent while providing equal access to education content across 27 schools and just over 2,000 desktops. The introduction of new courseware—what used to take more than a year—can now be implemented instantly across all schools.

"Cloud computing increases our flexibility in providing IT resources to meet the growing demands of our global business," said Mr. Peng Jin Song, General Manager, Information Technology at Sinochem. "With IBM CloudBurst and the technical expertise from IBM Cloud Labs in China, we will be able to pool and maximize our resources to run our global business on the most efficient infrastructure possible."

Fact Sheet: IBM Smart Business (PDF,30KB).