ARMONK, N.Y., May 9, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that SiteMinis, a mobile Web technology and services provider, has adopted IBM Cloud services including SoftLayer infrastructure, enabling dynamic mobile applications and websites that offer consumers an enhanced mobile shopping experience while cutting cloud hosting costs by 35 percent.

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SiteMinis chose Softlayer, an IBM company, to better serve its customers, improving speed to market for mobile sites from weeks to minutes, improving command and control through administrative process, and reducing overall costs of mobile Web site deployment. As a result, the company anticipates savings on cloud hosting costs while reducing issue resolution time from hours to just minutes.

Mobile commerce is expected to reach $617 billion worldwide by 2016, up from less than $106 billion in 2011(1). The increased adoption of mobile shopping has created a new frontier for online retailers. As a provider of mobile Web technology and services, SiteMinis helps more than 500 businesses across North America meet today's mobile and digital marketing demands through its cornerstone delivery platform - CliqLaunch.

The CliqLaunch platform allows marketing teams to improve the speed to market for their mobile commerce site. The pervasiveness of mobile shopping drives millions of hits every minute to the CliqLaunch platform leaving no room for error or outage. In order to successfully deliver, SiteMinis requires a reliable, high-availability hosting infrastructure.

With Softlayer, SiteMinis is able to deliver a comprehensive infrastructure platform at a lower cost, with exceptional ease of use and reliability. The Softlayer platform empowers SiteMinis with the ability to manage and monitor in a way it never had been able to before. It can access and monitor performance dashboard reports or instantly attend to a potential problem before it affects a client. In addition, highly responsive and attentive support from IBM helps SiteMinis deliver timely, detailed status information to SiteMinis users driving confidence for SiteMinis' clients and uninterrupted mobile shopping experiences for the consumer.

According to a recent IBM study(2), 50 percent of companies indicate that understanding how customers interact with their mobile applications and solutions is a significant challenge. With Softlayer, SiteMinis is helping its clients solve this pain point. For example, SiteMinis recently migrated CliqLaunch customer Home Depot Canada onto the SoftLayer Cloud platform. The company immediately appreciated its ease of use and accessibility to insights. With the change to SoftLayer, Home Depot Canada can now quickly and easily access and manage mobile shopping data helping to provide critical insights to its mobile shopping experience, performance and consumer engagement.

"Mobile has transformed the shopping experience, but the cloud's impact on mobile commerce is unrivaled. Choosing IBM Cloud has fundamentally transformed the way we deliver mobile Web technology and service to our clients, and as a result, how our clients deliver mobile commerce to consumers," said SiteMinis CEO Marci Troutman. "Softlayer's ease of use, accessibility and high availability have been paramount to our success. It is enabling us to provide instantaneous outage resolution capabilities and deliver premier customer service levels for our clients while helping to cut significant costs for our organization."

In providing SiteMinis with an infrastructure that is resilient enough to withstand their millions of hits, Softlayer is empowering SiteMinis to focus on its mission to help clients create exceptional mobile commerce experiences for consumers.

About IBM Cloud Computing
IBM has helped more than 30,000 clients around the world with 40,000 industry experts. Since its acquisition in 2013, IBM SoftLayer has served 4,500 new cloud clients. Today, IBM has 100+ cloud SaaS solutions, thousands of experts with deep industry knowledge helping clients transform and a network of 40 data centers worldwide. Since 2007, IBM has invested more than $7 billion in 17 acquisitions to accelerate its cloud initiatives and build a high value cloud portfolio. IBM holds 1,560 cloud patents focused on driving innovation. In fact, IBM for the 21st consecutive year topped the annual list of US patent leaders. IBM processes more than 5.5M client transactions daily through IBM's public cloud. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/cloud. Follow us on Twitter at @IBMcloud and on our blog at http://www.thoughtsoncloud.com. Join the conversation #ibmcloud.

About SiteMinis
Atlanta-based SiteMinis, Inc. offers one of the only mobile website App platforms that can be deployed across every Web-enabled cell phone and all popular smartphone operating systems such as iPhone, Android, Palm, Nokia, Microsoft's Windows Mobile and Blackberry without a reduction in quality of the user experience, yet bringing the latest technologies with HTML5 into each and every site. SiteMinis develops and integrates profitable mobile commerce and informational sites that simplify the IT deployment and brand design issues faced by companies doing business on the Internet today. Providing mCommerce technology and consulting services that radically improve, simplify and increase a company's mobile marketing and branding exposure to attract and engage mobile consumers.

[1] Source: Forecast: Mobile payment, worldwide, 2009-2016, Gartner, May 9, 2012

[2] IBM Institute for Business Value, October 2013, "The Upwardly Mobile Enterprise: Setting the Strategic Agenda,"

Dana Anastasi
857-259-0866
danastasi@us.ibm.com

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20090416/IBMLOGO

SOURCE IBM Corporation