IBM Global Services Receives 'Strong Positive' Rating in North American Data Center Outsourcing
446788
IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that analyst firm, Gartner Inc., rated its Data Center Outsourcing capabilities as a "Strong Positive" service in its July 26, 2006 "MarketScope for Data Center Outsourcing, North America" report.
385411
Second-quarter earnings at International Business Machines Corp. rose 12 percent and beat Wall Street forecasts Wednesday, largely on the strength of IBM's software division and improvement in its services unit.
652552
Circuit City CIO Bill McCorey explained his decision to outsource the company's data center operations to IBM in a keynote speech at the ERIeXchange conference in Boston.
208888
A report from Gartner shows IBM in first place in worldwide IT services in 2003, with HP slipping one notch to fifth place.
70426
IBM has signed a 7-year, $969 million  contract with British bank Lloyds TSB to supply it with  Internet telephony and data services, The U.S.-based computer  giant said on Monday.
415488
IBM reported a 6 percent increase in profit for its fiscal third quarter as a strong performance from its services business offset a slide in hardware revenue.
176436
International Business Machines Corp. said Wednesday it signed a pair of outsourcing contracts worth more than US$1 billion (euro752 million) with two Danish companies, continuing the computer giant&#39;s push into northern Europe.
222857
International Business Machines Corp.  IBM.N said it is making the design of its "blade" computer  servers widely available, in a move designed to gain wider  acceptability in data centers and the telecommunications  industry.
437393
IBM  reported  better-than-expected preliminary quarterly results on Monday on  strong performances in Asia, Europe and emerging markets,  driving its shares up 10 percent and spurring a broader tech  rally.
96725
Strong overseas demand pushes IBM to a better-than-expected fourth quarter.
590574
InfoWorld - It may be too early to talk plug-and-play but IBM&#160;believes it can help businesses of all sizes easily cluster their servers to handle intensive computing workloads.
322934
By Trebor Banstetter, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas  Mar. 3--American Airlines will outsource some of its human-resources work to IBM in a deal worth $217 million.   Officials confirmed the deal Friday but said it will not result in layoffs.
28608
International Business Machines Corp. (IBM.N) widened its lead last year in the U.S. market for Internet hosting services as it won a greater share of the medium-sized business market, according to data recently published by market research firm IDC.
29779
IBM said Monday it had sealed a 1.4 billion dollar, seven-year, global IT outsourcing deal with Britain&#39;s AstraZeneca, a major pharmaceutical group.
737939
IBM Corp. expects about $1 billion in revenue from India, as the company&#39;s hardware and services business in the local market soars.The company made $700 million in revenue from India last year, said a company spokesman Monday. In the first three quarters of this year, the company posted revenue growth of 39 percent over the previous year. &quot;At the current growth rates, we expect revenue of $1 billion for the year,&quot; the spokesman added.Unlike Indian outsourcers who have mainly focused on more lucrative contracts abroad, multinational services companies like IBM have focused on the growing Indian outsourcing market.IBM India&#39;s contribution to IBM&#39;s global revenue is higher if the revenues from services delivered from India to global customers are also included. These are higher than domestic revenue and growing faster, said the IBM spokesman who did not give exact figures. This is however included in the revenue of the country in which the services have been contracted, and are not reflected in IBM&#39;s India revenues, he added.India is a key hub for the global delivery of services by IBM, as the company takes advantage of the country&#39;s large pool of skilled manpower.Reports, including in The Wall Street Journal, quoted an IBM official in the U.S. as saying that the company has increased its staff in India to 73,000 this year. The IBM India spokesman was unable to confirm this data immediately, but he confirmed that the company had 53,000 staff in the country at the end of last year.Although the company does not break down the number of staff it has in offshore software development and services in India, most of the new additions are likely to have been made in the company&#39;s outsourcing operations based in India, with the rest of the additions in sales and marketing.The expansion by IBM in India comes even as staff availability there has gotten tighter and salaries are on the increase. India is still attractive to foreign companies to set up software development and services subsidiaries or outsource work, as salaries are still competitive and the talent pool is large, said Siddharth Pai, a partner at outsourcing consultancy firm Technology Partners International Inc (TPI) in Houston, in an interview last month.
739519
IBM's global services organization is adding "health check" services to its repertoire of technical services for SOA deployments, looking to assist users dealing with issues resulting from poor planning or partnerships with inexperienced or so-called proprietary IT vendors.The company also is offering its "identity-aware ESB," which is an enterprise service bus that combines existing IBM products to provide identity management capabilities.Health-check services and software will be offered in two workshops to be held at customer sites, featuring specialized diagnostics and triage capabilities to help identify potentially unhealthy areas and recommend cures for problem areas."We try to bring a real breadth of capability from the best practices that we've learned into these workshops," said Marie Wieck, vice president of middleware services at IBM.With some clients, IBM has had to perform somewhat of a rescue mission after clients have done an initial application and then had problems with scalability or performance, Wieck said.Workshops, which are priced in the $50,000 range or less, include IBM SOA Applications and Services and Healthcheck Workshop and Infrastructure Healthcheck Workshop for SOA. Both are 2.5-day engagements intended for midmarket and large enterprises.The applications and services workshop is intended to provide assurance that an SOA can expand beyond pilot projects. Factors such as application reuse and service use will be assessed, as will identification of rogue services as part of a governance policy. Security also will be checked for service controls and identity management.The infrastructure workshop features an assessment of infrastructure supporting applications and services layers in an SOA. Elements examined include infrastructure flexibility, the ability to adapt to spikes in demand, and verifying SOA configurations for connectivity. A service management review ensures that services are being monitored.IBM's identity-aware ESB combines WebSphere ESB products with Tivoli security and identity management software to help ensure that access to information, services, and applications is protected. Auditing of identity and access activity is enabled."Identity management is very critical so that you can ensure that only the right people get access to these services," Wieck said.An analyst briefed on IBM's efforts lauded both the SOA and ESB programs."Customers who have started with a SOA need checkpoints to have an outside source assess what they are doing and how it compares to best practices," said Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz &amp; Associates. "Companies are investing a lot of money, resources, and political capital on SOA, and management wants to make sure they are on track and doing the right thing."Governance is a huge issue for customers in regards to SOA implementation. This is especially true since SOA is as much a business strategy as it is a technology strategy," Hurwitz said."In terms of ID-aware ESB ? clearly security and identity management are huge issues for companies because of governance issues related to security," she said.IBM offers information about its SOA programs at its Web site.Also on Monday, IBM is announcing an initiative to help business partners increase revenues and better serve customers. Grow Your Business (GYB) with IBM Software provides cross-brand sales scenarios across the IBM software group's product portfolio.The GYB tool recommends scenarios that utilize business partners' existing areas of expertise. Partners through the initiative can analyze software products, get descriptions of business value, and determine return on investment via an online tool. Information is aggregated into one place.An online guide to marketing and sales materials also is highlighted.
661186
The approach will vastly improve performance for applications that need to move large amounts of graphic data, such as networking and multimedia, IBM says.