Slovenian Retailer Mercator Selects IBM Self Checkout
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Slovenian retail group Mercator has successfully implemented IBM (NYSE: IBM) Self Checkout solutions in its Celje store to improve in-store traffic flows, speed checkout and increase customer service and loyalty, IBM announced. This is the first implementation of this kind in South East Europe.
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New York, August 27: International Business Machines Corp. on Thursday said it will acquire Venetica, whose software allows users to view and process files in a variety of software formats.
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Circuit City this week bucked the trend of retailers opting for Windows-based point-of-sale systems by announcing plans to migrate to Linux-based IBM cash registers at its 600 stores.
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SECOND LIFE -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it is working with Circuit City Stores, Inc., a leading specialty retailer of consumer electronics, to explore how to apply virtual worlds and 3-D environments to retail business models.
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IBM on Friday announced it acquired privately held Systems Research & Development (SRD), for an undisclosed amount, to fill out its business intelligence middleware portfolio.
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Some business software vendors are determined to steer their own ships in a sea of acquisitions.
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Dutch retail giant Ahold has announced that it has sold its Spanish retail operations to European private equity firm Permira for around â¬685m (US$846.
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Ana G. Mendez University System has chosen IBM (NYSE: IBM) to develop and install a system that allows students to pay tuition and fees faster and easier.
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COPENHAGEN  - IBM has signed a pair of outsourcing contracts worth more than &#36;1 billion US with two Danish companies, continuing the computer giant's push into northern Europe.
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To help its customers get a handle on all the data scattered across their enterprises, IBM Thursday announced plans to acquire Venetica, a privately held company that makes content integration software.
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Dutch retailer Ahold has sold its network of about 600 Spanish retail stores to private equity group Permira. The two parties valued the deal at 685m euros ($850m; Â£472m).
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IBM has bought XIV, an Israeli manufacturer of SAN equipment. XIV's main product is Nextra, a storage system based on a grid of standard hardware components.
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InfoWorld - Leveraging its acquisition of Trego, an ISV with a product information management system, IBM unveiled additional middleware components to work with the Trego technology to ensure product data synchronization between retailers and suppliers.
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IBM said Monday that it is partnering with ACI Worldwide, an electronic payment software vendor, to create a payments system based on service oriented architecture (SOA) principles.ACI&#39;s software will be combined with IBM&#39;s System z mainframe, DB2 database, WebSphere middleware, Tivoli IT management software and Crypto-chip technology, according to an IBM statement. ACI also intends to host its software in IBM&#39;s data centers, for customers who desire an on-demand payments system.IBM said the combination of ACI&#39;s technology and its own will result in an SOA foundation that allows payment information to be shared throughout enterprises, many of which see a tangle of legacy systems strewn across their IT environments.The partnership will first result in a version of ACI&#39;s BASE24-eps online payments software optimized for System z; a wholesale payments product aimed at the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA), and real-time fraud detection technology. Later, the companies will focus on smart card management, dispute management, online banking and a payment hub implementing IBM&#39;s Payments Framework, they said.ACI&#39;s customers include more than 110 of the world&#39;s top 500 banks, according to IBM.
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IBM has bought XIV, an Israeli manufacturer of SAN (storage area network) equipment. XIV&#39;s main product is Nextra, a storage system based on a grid of standard hardware components.Nextra&#39;s self-healing, self-tuning, and dynamic scaling capabilities will give IBM new technology to address the growing requirement for high-performance storage for digital archives, digital media, and Web 2.0 applications, IBM said.Around 4 petabytes (4 million gigabytes) of Nextra storage are already in service, XIV said.XIV employees will join IBM&#39;s system storage business unit, the companies said. Moshe Yanai, chairman of XIV, previously worked at EMC.The companies would not put a price on the deal, but reports in the Israeli financial press earlier this week valued it at $300 million to $350 million.This is the latest in a line of storage-related acquisitions for IBM, which recently&#160;bought Softek,&#160;FileNet,&#160;and NovusCG to beef up its storage offering.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM released SOA productsÂ for integrating software applications and improving business processes, and said more customers are starting to understand the SOA concept. IBM is encouraging businesses to create discrete, "loosely coupled" processes that can be monitored individually and fine tuned for better performance. Building such an architecture can be complex and requires services from IBM, but the result should be a more nimble and competitive business, according to IBM. The first new offering is a set of software packages to help companies in specific industries -- initially health care, insurance, banking, and telecommunications -- automate processes using an SOA, or services-oriented architecture. The term refers to a way of designing IT systems so that services, such as an insurance claim approval, can be reused or modified more easily. The packages come with prebuilt templates for processes and standards common to each of the four industries. The health-care package, for example, ensures that SOA applications comply with the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act for managing health-care data. The offerings stem fromÂ IBM's acquisition last year of Webify Solutions, which focused on the health-care and insurance industries. IBM updated those packages and created others for the two new industries, said Manoj Saxena, a vice president with IBM Global Business Services and formerly Webify's CEO. It has also translated the products into several languages. The packages, each known as a WebSphere Business Services Fabric, start from $300,000 for an unlimited number of processors and end users, IBM said. The company also released an update to WebSphere Business Monitor, which tracks the performance of business processes. "For example, if I'm an insurance company I might have a goal to process claims about chipped windshields in two hours. This tool shows me how long I am taking, and I can see that the problem is originating from my processing center in Prague, or wherever." The previous version looked primarily at people-based processes, while the update looks at content-based processes and also gives a geographic view through a connection into the Google Maps Web service. IBM's Lotus division has employed Google Maps before, but this is the first time it has been included with a WebSphere product. Pricing for WebSphere Monitor starts at $88,500 for 100 "processor value units," an IBM pricing plan that takes processor type into account. Explaining the benefits of SOA to a CEO can be a tough sell, although Saxena said IT people understand the idea a lot better than 18 months ago, and sales cycles are shorter. "It used to be very education-heavy," he said. Business people want to see where the value is in SOA. "It's a bit like where we were with the Internet in 1995," he said. "People put up Web pages and pretty catalogues but business people didn't really see the value of it until you put a shopping cart around it. We're at the same stage with SOA. We're past the project-level discussion and now it's a question of how to take it to the business level." Regulatory compliance concerns also inhibit SOA adoption. "They are quickly realizing there's this notion of rogue services, with people publishing services all over the place that people can use." Information industries like finance and insurance are moving more quickly to SOA than physical goods industries such as manufacturing. Information industries tend to use more home-grown software and less packaged software from the likes of SAPÂ and Oracle, Saxena said. Those packages aren't necessarily less flexible but customers tend to be tied to the vendors' release cycles, which affects the timing of new projects, he said. Europe has caught up considerably to the U.S. in its SOA adoption, according to Saxena. IBM also introduced services to help customers figure out where they can get the most value from integrating processes, how far along the road they are today and what tools and services they can use. IBM encourages customers to begin with small projects, and typical engagements are four to six months, Saxena said. IBM sees five levels of SOA readiness from "ad hoc" through "aware" to "world class." He estimated that most Fortune 1000 companies are between levels one and two, although a company may be more advanced in a particular area like IT systems. Wednesday's releases are the first of several SOA announcements IBM will make in the coming weeks, targeting companies at different stages of SOA development.
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SUBANG JAYA: IBM (www.ibm.com) has released the beta version of its latest enterprise-grade integration software to Malaysian customers.