IBM sets up infrastructure services operation in India for SMBs
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IBM has set up a services delivery operation in India that will focus on infrastructure services to its clients worldwide.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM is taking the first step toward a major overhaul of how it packages and sells global services. The vendor is due to begin rolling out the first two of what it terms "service products" worldwide on Tuesday. The standardized offerings are designed to be used by any IBM customer anywhere, a very different approach from the company's previous focus on providing customized, one-off services to individual users. "This will enable us to access the market in a new way," Laurence Guihard-Joly, vice president of IBM's newly formed Integrated Communications Services (ICS) unit, said. "Our strategy is to get to the next level in services, to be brand-driven in the way our systems technology and software already are." The first two services are Network Convergence Services Product and Internet Protocol (IP) Telephony Services Product. The network convergence bundle of services is aimed at customers keen to determine their readiness for adopting communications networks that combine support for data, voice, and video. The IP telephony offering is for users looking to work with IBM and its partners, including Cisco Systems, on designing, deploying, and managing IP telephony infrastructure. As part of the restructuring, IBM has taken what was the networking services piece of IBM Global Services (IGS) and turned it into a new business unit, ICS. Although IBM's services business is a huge operation, its growth rate has appeared somewhat stagnant over recent quarters. In the company's most recent financial results, IBM reported IGS revenue fell 0.9 percent to $11.9 billion compared with the year-ago quarter. IGS competes against Accenture, Capgemini, and Electronic Data SystemsÂ (EDS). "IBM is trying to invigorate its services business and propel it into growth faster than it has been," Bob Djurdjevic, president of Annex Research, said. He expects IBM's rivals will also adopt the service product approach in areas where they have specific expertise to draw upon. IBM begun the work on the new services strategy a year ago engaging in a "deep re-analysis of the market" including talking to its customers at all levels, Guihard-Joly said. By year end, IBM plans to release around 30 service products. They will be a mix of brand-new offerings and existing assets that have been "reassembled, updated, hardened and tested," Guihard-Joly said. The products will include network management services around the Netcool software IBM acquired when it bought Micromuse and radio frequency identification (RFID) services. Even with highly complex projects, Guihard-Joly believes about 80 percent of a customer's services needs could be met by IBM's new building block approach. The new ICS business unit has four main focuses for its services -- converged communications; networking strategy and optimization; mobility, wireless and RFID; and network integration and management services. IBM may create other business units within its evolving services operations. "The key challenge is going to be training their own staff to think in a new way," Djurdjevic said. Having a specific unit focused on a specific market might help employees move more quickly to the different way of doing business.
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Joint work with IBM is part of strategy to deliver apps that let customers use Web services to build adaptable service-oriented architectures.
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IBM&#39;s Global Services division Thursday announced the formation of a management practice to help customers implement service-oriented architectures.
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PeopleSoft will bundle its future business applications with IBM&#39;s infrastructure software as part of a billion-dollar technology and marketing agreement between the two companies.
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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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IBM on Wednesday announced the pre-release of several tools for SMBs (small and midsize businesses) designed to speed development of solutions built on IBM middleware.
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InfoWorld - IBM&#160;unveiled a Web site and IT security software application Thursday as part of its effort to compete with Hewlett-Packard&#160;and Sun&#160;for customers in the fast-growing SMB sector.
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IBM will run the contract and provide mainframe and server consolidation and IT operations for the Texas state government. Contract partners Unisys Corp. will provide data center operations and facilities management.
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IBM has announced virtual resources to help its business partners accelerate the building and deployment of on-demand business applications tailored to customer requirements across all vertical industries.
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Indian outsourcers already have a large share of outsourced application development and maintenance and are dominant in business process outsourcing. The country is now targeting a larger share of the market for remote infrastructure management services (IMS), and is planning to more than double revenue from these services to $15 billion by 2013.IMS involves managing an enterprise&#8217;s core IT systems, including hardware, software, connectivity and people. The IMS industry is moving towards a remote delivery model where services are increasing delivered from low-cost locations by service providers and wholly-owned services subsidiaries of user companies, according to a report released Thursday by India&#8217;s National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom).Customers in the US and Europe are increasingly willing to outsource IMS to offshore locations, because the data does not move out of the home countries, and is only managed remotely, said Siddharth Pai, a partner at sourcing consultancy firm,Technology Partners International (TPI) in Houston, Texas.In India, IMS business is going both to Indian outsourcers, and the Indian operations of large IT services companies, Pai said. Because of the large staff component involved in IMS, there are cost benefits in outsourcing IMS to low-cost, offshore locations like India, he added.Research done by management consultancy firm McKinsey for Nasscom, suggests that the IMS business could generate between 325,000 to 375,000 jobs in India by 2013, as 70 to 75 percent of the roles in IMS can be moved offshore.Low-cost locations, including India, have so far captured a mere $6 to 7 billion&#160;of the IMS opportunity.Indian outsourcers have so far learned to price their services on the basis of staff time utilized. They now have to learn more sophisticated pricing that takes into account other parameters like amount of computing power being managed, if they are not to risk losing money in the business, Pai said.
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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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IBM said the strategy is to enable companies to centrally manage business applications and tools across employee devices. That should help companies cut IT support costs as well as build work
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IBM and APC have joined forces to build pre-engineered data centers aimed at small and medium-sized businesses that need facilities in the 500- to 1000-square-foot range.
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IBM has unveiled virtual resources to help business partners more quickly build and deploy on-demand business applications tailored to customer requirements across all vertical industries.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM's India Research Lab has developed a location-based service for mobile phone users that helps mobile users to connect with both fixed and mobile businesses in their vicinity. When deployed by mobile phone service providers, the business finder technology allows a consumer to find and use the nearest, most highly rated and available service vendors like plumbers, electricians, carpenters or doctors, a spokesman for IBM India Research said Tuesday. The technology has already gone through pilot trials with some mobile service providers, the spokesman said. IBM is currently in talks with service providers for the commercial deployment of the technology, he added. "As a research organization, we are not directly involved in the commercialization of the technology," he said. The business finder technology combines geographic information system (GIS) applications and data analysis with mobile telephone networks to provide information to a consumer who is looking for a specific nearby service, IBM said. Â  The technology stands out from others in its ability to connect to mobile businesses and vendors that may be in the vicinity when a service is required, the spokesman said. The ability to rate vendors and businesses on a number of parameters including reputation is an added benefit, he added. It combines various attributes including location, reputation, dynamic workload and feedback from consumers to match consumers with the closest available vendors. The underlying technology allows telecommunications service providers to track and update data sources including mobility, presence and reputation of service vendors, IBM added.Â  The business finder technology has a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and is based on IMS (Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem) telecommunications standards. The technology could be hosted by a network operator or deployed as a third-party service to different operators. IBM India Research Lab has operations in Delhi and Bangalore. Some of the research of the lab is in the area of bridging the digital divide and e-governance projects. It is for example working on the National Health Data Network (NHDN), a project with the Indian government to establish standards-driven, secure and cost-sensitive infrastructure to coordinate health care information.
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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.