IBM opens venture-capital center in Dublin
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(InfoWorld) - IBM launched its European Venture Capital Center in Dublin, the first such center outside of the company's corporate offices in Menlo Park, California. The center will be a place where IBM helps unite European startup companies with venture-capital firms and also where IBM can share some of its experiences with startups. Often small companies have found investors but lack the expertise to globalize and scale their offerings, said Nick Donofrio, IBM's executive vice president for innovation and technology, speaking during a press conference in Dublin. "We have those skills," he said. IBM will share such expertise with startups that participate in the center through events including subject-specific round tables or large conferences, such as one that IBM held in New York last week. Encouraging the success of emerging businesses ensures that IBM has strong partners to add to its ecosystem into the future, he said. IBM does not intend to invest in any of the participating companies directly but could in rare cases consider buying a company that might be developing technology fundamental to IBM's business, Donofrio said. IBM chose to place the center in Ireland in part due to its 50 year history in the country but also because of other factors that make it an ideal location. Ireland has a strong academic environment, government support for emerging technology companies, a culture of entrepreneurship and a presence of many global companies, said Deborah Magid, director of strategic alliances, software strategy for IBM Venture Capital Group. She couldn't say how many people the new center might employ but added that existing IBM staff would likely contribute to the center's efforts. IBM is alsoÂ opening an Innovation CenterÂ in Dublin, aimed at helping local software developers test and build products. In July,Â IBM said it was investingÂ â¬46 million ($59 million) and hiring 300 workers in Dublin. The new Venture Capital Center and Innovation Center are part of that ongoing investment. Â ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Meanwhile, Dell plants some trees... IBM has beefed up its data output while apparently watching its carbon footprint step by adding a new $86m "green data centre" space to its Boulder site in Colorado, USA.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - IBM has chosen Sao Paulo as the sixth global location for its specialized software and services laboratories known as "Hipods" or high-performance on-demand solutions facilities, which focus on resolving large-scale computing issues for IBM customers, including eBayÂ and Google. IBM opened the multimillion dollar Brazilian lab Tuesday. The lab will be linked to five existing Hipods worldwide -- IBM's central Hipod facility in its Santa Teresa lab in San Jose, California, and Hipod satellite operations in Beijing; Bangalore, India; Yamato, Japan; and Hursley, U.K. Although IBM won't put a precise financial figure on its Hipod investments, the company did give some sense of the labs' combined computing power. Together, the six Hipods contain more than 1,000 servers, draw on over 20TB of data and employ more than 200 staff, according to Kristof Kloeckner, vice president of strategy and technology for IBM's software group. Researchers in the six Hipods can collaborate virtually with each other using grid computing to quickly form project teams and assign server, software and storage resources for a particular project. They can use their pooled resources to simulate customers' IT environments or a particular computing issue a large user is trying to resolve. When IBM set up its first Hipod four to five years ago, it was to create a team to build knowledge around how best to configure and build high-volume Web sites like online auction site eBay, Kloeckner said. EBay has been a major customer for IBM first in the U.S. and more recently in China, turning to the Hipods for advice on how to scale up its worldwide operations to serve 200 million users. Over time, the Hipods teams have widened their focus to other areas including process automation, virtualization and approaches to SOA (service-oriented architecture). For instance, the labs researchers have come up with a Web-based service to determine how SOA-based workloads perform when used by businesses such as those in banking, travel and insurance. In India, the Bangalore Hipod researchers built a service delivery platform for local mobile phone operator Bharti Airtel to help the rapidly growing carrier handle the addition of 1 million new customers per month, Kloeckner said. Other IBM customers that have also worked with Hipods include Ford Motor, Gap, the New York Stock Exchange, Visa International Service Association, and Whirlpool. Brazil was "the obvious choice" for a Latin American Hipod given the country's size, Kloeckner said, and also continues the vendor's investment in Brazil. IBM has identified five emerging markets it dubs the BRICK countries -- Brazil,Â Russia, India, China and South Korea -- as specific nations where it's keen to invest multimillions of dollars to attract more local customers and partners. Last year, IBM moved its Latin American headquarters from Miami to Sao Paulo. Kloeckner pointed out that IBM'sÂ planned $740 million acquisitionÂ of industrial asset management software vendor MRO SoftwareÂ announced last month will net the company an additional 40- to 50-person team in Brazil. As to where IBM might plan to put a seventh Hipod, the "next logical move" would be Central Europe, Kloeckner said. Although no decisions have been made yet, the vendor may look to establish a Hipod in either Poland or Russia in the coming years, he added.
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New York: The US-based software major IBM, along with representatives of the world&#39;s leading science, education and philanthropic outfits, has launched a global effort aimed at harnessing the vast computing power of individuals and business computers and
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(InfoWorld) - It may be too early to talk plug-and-play but IBMÂ believes it can help businesses of all sizes easily cluster their servers to handle intensive computing workloads. Leveraging its expertise in high-end computing and vertical industry applications, IBM has launched several initiatives to allow small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) and the departments of large enterprises to integrate their servers -- from as few as two to many thousands -- into computing clusters designed for high-performance computing tasks, the company said Wednesday. Initially targeted at the businesses in the life sciences, computer-aided engineering, and finance sectors, IBM will offer preconfigured "snap-together" cluster systems for customers using the company's computers and storage devices. The systems are designed to run on Linux and Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 operating systems and will include networking technology from companies such as Cisco Systems. The collaboration with Microsoft will allow businesses to use parallel processing on clusters to free up client machines from long-running applications. ISVs (independent software vendors) and business partners will receive tools to help them introduce IBM's cluster systems. These include sizing guides with predefined cluster configurations for simple ordering and installation. IBM business partners have access to the company's Cluster Enablement Team for technical questions and advice. For customers, software vendors and business partners running Microsoft cluster servers, IBM has four new benchmarking facilities in Poughkeepsie, New York, Raleigh, North Carolina, Beaverton, Oregon and Montpelier, France. These centers join a network of global Linux benchmark centers. To attract businesses interested in computing clusters, IBM's Deep Computing Capacity on Demand centers will give them access to more than 20,000 processors to test the technology for themselves. IBM offers a range of products that support computing clusters, including its System x, System p and BladeCenter servers, as well as the IBM System Storage and IBM System Cluster 1350.
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Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced the launch of China's first Energy Competency Center (ECC), a joint effort by IBM and Intel, at a press conference at the IBM China Business Innovation Center (CBIC), located in the Beijing Shangdi Information Industry Base.
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(InfoWorld) - IBMÂ is making another move to strengthen ties with global IT startups and their venture capital backers, providing special access to the technical experts and products housed in IBM Innovation Centers. The vendor is due to make the announcement Thursday at its Venture Capital Symposium at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. The symposium brings together venture capitalists (VCs), the startups they fund, and IBM staff. IBM runs 32 Innovation Centers worldwide, offering training, testing and support facilities for the company's partners and customers in relation to IBM hardware, software and services. The vendor has eight centers in the Americas, 18 in Europe and the Middle East, and six in Asia-Pacific, with the most recent opened in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. IBM plans to open its thirty-third Innovation Center in Dublin, Ireland, next week, according to Drew Clark, director of strategy for IBM's Venture Capital Group. The company will also open its European Venture Capital Center at the same time on the same site as the Dublin Innovation Center, he said. VC-backed startups gave IBM feedback that they wanted more access to the company's technologies, Clark said. The idea is to give the startups free access on the product side to emerging technologies such as IBM's blade servers and its Cell processor and to offer the companies ways to develop and test their software against IT set-ups that may not exist within their own regions. All the centers are linked via grid software so that once a developer's software has been uploaded to the IBM system in one location, it's easy to distribute to other centers. IBM can give startups free advice on how best to approach markets outside their home countries, for instance, how a company in China can sell its offerings in the U.S., Clark said. Startups also can talk to IBM's technical architects either face-to-face in the centers or remotely from their phones or computers to take advantage of their specific areas of expertise. What IBM gets out of theÂ tighter relationship with VC-backed startupsÂ is access to developing companies. "It's the sweet spot for IBM," Clark said. "It's early enough that we can have some influence over companies." IBM can encourage the startups to join its partner programs and to use more of its hardware, software and services. Another interesting benefit to IBM is seeing how different geographies adopt newer technologies. For instance, in China, the platform of choice to use Web 2.0 software like social networking, blogs and wikis is a mobile handset, not a PC running a Web browser as is the case in the U.S. "We can spot trends and understand very early on what the software's doing," Clark said. The early insight helps IBM get a better handle on which technologies it needs to make available to users in the future. "It's a very nice virtuous cycle," he added.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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The City of Brownsville, Texas, has hired IBM (NYSE: IBM) to help design an enterprise modernization project, providing city departments with a wireless Internet infrastructure and residents with an improved access to city services.
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Officials announced the launch of an IBM Innovation Center in Beijing Thursday to find better ways to get software from ISVs (define) around the world into the computers of small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in China.
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By Rodney Tanaka, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Calif.  Dec. 13--PASADENA -- A local tech company is partnering with IBM to build  chips used in digital cameras and X-ray machines.
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IBM Corp. Monday introduced new services, dubbed Open Client, designed to make it easier for customers to run its Lotus collaboration software on a mixture of Windows and Linux desktop operating systems.
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Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) opened its US $2.6 million Oil Sands Centre of Excellence in Calgary, which aims to help petroleum producers test and use new technologies that will lower costs and make oil recovery easier, more efficient, and more intelligent.
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IBM announced Monday a set of offerings from its Virtual Innovation Center for Hardware, including &quot;how-to&quot; guides and a solution sizing toolkit, all aimed at helping the company&#39;s business partners build and deploy applications on IBM technology.
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IBM  will open in France its first  nuclear consultancy centre in July, at a time when utilities  are looking to build new reactors and stretch the old ones&#39;  lifetime, an executive said on Monday.
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IBM is expanding and adding new  technology to 11 of its data centers in North America, Europe  and Asia to meet growing demand and rolled out new services to  customers, the world's largest computer company said late on  Thursday.
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InfoWorld - IBM shored up commitment to its mainframe computing platform Thursday with a series of new technologies, investments in emerging markets, new industry-focused solutions, and new partnerships.
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Big Blue adds "innovaton center" to its China Research Lab to develop technology catering to small and midsize businesses.