IBM today announced the world's largest private cloud computing environment for business analytics, which will provide IBM sales teams and developers new levels of insight to better meet the needs of clients worldwide. The cloud will launch initially with more than a petabyte of data, the equivalent of more than 300 billion ATM transactions.

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IBM also announced a new solution, the IBM Smart Analytics Cloud, for clients to build their own private cloud environments based on the same Cloud infrastructure that IBM is using internally.

IBM's Internal Business Analytics Cloud

Internally called Blue Insight, IBM's cloud environment democratizes information, providing access to a variety of client and market data regardless of where an employee sits in the company. It gathers information from nearly 100 different information warehouses and data stores, providing analytics on more than a petabyte (1,000 terabytes or 1,000,000 gigabytes) of data. By turning that data into insight for IBM's sales force and development communities, IBM will be able to deliver more value in the solutions and services it offers to its clients. More than 200,000 IBMers will have access to the new system.

"This new cloud and the insights that our analytics will provide are the next step in the continuous transformation of our business to better serve our clients," said Pat Toole, chief information officer (CIO) of IBM. "I expect this first-of-its-kind approach will help drive both new growth opportunities as well as have a significant impact in cost savings, which is exactly the kind of client-focused value that businesses are asking of their IT organizations."

Structured and unstructured data will be available in the cloud and accessible from anywhere to provide IBM employees and executives with specific insights:

  --  Sales teams will have a deeper understanding of a client's
      relationship with the whole of IBM from around the world - not just
      their region or product group - and be able to better predict which
      products and services would deliver the most client value based on
      this view.
  --  Product development teams will be able to quickly analyze sales
      information, industry trends and customer perceptions, and adjust
      product planning and development specifications accordingly.

  --  A manufacturing process engineer will be able to evaluate real-time
      data on the plant floor to identify trends and adjust manufacturing
      processes as needed to improve yields and reduce shipment delivery
      times.

Blue Insight will run on a System z10 mainframe computer with 48 processors (32 processors for production, 18 processors for development and test environments) and strong cryptography - capable of handling up to 10,000 secure transactions per second, with redundant backup support.

IBM Smart Analytics Cloud offering for clients

In addition to consolidating, virtualizing and delivering its own business intelligence via a cloud model, IBM will offer clients a solution to do the same. Today IBM is also announcing the IBM Smart Analytics Cloud - a private analytics cloud solution for large enterprises. IBM Smart Analytics Cloud provides easily-consumable business intelligence services, systems and software to help customers efficiently deliver shared business intelligence services across lines of business and functional organizations.

IBM's own Analytics Cloud deployment served as the template for this solution offering, which features:

  --  IBM services - enables a client to transform its corporate business
      intelligence (BI) strategy and achieve rapid return on investment with
      planning and strategy sessions, installation and implementation of the
      Smart Analytic cloud solution, as well as optimization of the cloud
      for the enterprise.
  --  IBM Cognos 8 BI - provides the BI capability for the cloud, offering a
      broad range of business intelligence services, including reports,
      analysis and dashboards to monitor business performance, analyze
      trends and measure results.

  --  IBM System z - supports the foundation for the cloud with z/VM,
      industry-leading virtualization running Linux on efficient "specialty
      engines" for massive scale with resilient, secure, multi-tenant
      operations.

In the recent IBM Global CIO Study of more than 2,500 CIOs around the world, 83 percent of respondents identified business intelligence and analytics - the ability to see patterns in vast amounts of data and extract actionable insights - as the top way they will enhance their organizations' competitiveness and ability to meet client needs.

Blue Insight will join a number of other successful Cloud and Analytics implementations running inside IBM today:

  --  Technology Adoption Program: IBM's TAP Cloud, based at  IBM's Green
      Innovation Data Center in Southbury, Connecticut, enables employees to
      become early adopters and evaluators of technology, with more than
      125,000 employees accessing more than 100 previously-unavailable
      technology programs from a self-serve menu.
  --  IBM's Research Cloud, called RC2, has enabled thousands of IBM
      Research and Development team members to access technical applications
      they need for research projects. It has saved IBM more than $500,000
      in deployment costs in the past year alone.

  --  On Target: an analytics program that is a prospecting tool to identify
      additional client opportunities. It has already identified more than
      100,000 sales leads for IBM.

IBM Smart Analytics Cloud is available today. For more information, visit: http://www.ibm.com/systems/z/solutions/cloud/smart.html.

More information about IBM's cloud computing products and services is available at: http://www.ibm.com/cloud.

  Media contacts:
  Tim Willeford
  IBM
  (914) 766-3389
  twilleford@us.ibm.com

  Kelly Sims
  IBM
  (917) 472-3456
  kelly.sims@us.ibm.com

First Call Analyst:
FCMN Contact: twilleford@us.ibm.com

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SOURCE: IBM