IBM is continuing to expand its global cloud computing network to 40 cloud centres with 12 new locations serving a growing roster of enterprise clients looking to move to hybrid cloud computing. IBM will reach customers in 12 new locations, including IBM Cloud centres in Frankfurt, Mexico City and Tokyo, and nine more centres through a strategic partnership with Equinix in Australia, France, Japan, Singapore, The Netherlands and the US.
IBM’s agreement with Equinix provides direct access to the full portfolio of SoftLayer cloud services via the Equinix Cloud Exchange™ in nine markets worldwide spanning the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific, including Amsterdam, Dallas, Chicago, Paris, Silicon Valley, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Washington, D.C. Through this partnership, SoftLayer provides customers with the ability to easily move production workloads in and out of the cloud, thus better enabling them to fully realize their hybrid cloud strategies.
The new IBM Cloud centers in Frankfurt, Mexico City and Tokyo mark the latest delivery of IBM’s $1.2 billion committment announced in January 2014 commitment to grow IBM’s cloud presence around the world to meet these local mandates with performance, security and data controls built in.
Hybrid Cloud growth
Enterprise cloud deployments, specifically hybrid cloud, are growing at a significant rate. According to leading technology research firm, Gartner, Inc., nearly half of all enterprises will have a hybrid cloud deployed by 2017. Chief among the driving forces behind the adoption of cloud computing worldwide including hybrid cloud, are requirements for businesses and governments to store certain data locally to comply with data residency regulations, as well as a growing desire for start-ups to expand their businesses globally. IBM estimates about 100 nations and territories have adopted laws that dictate how governments and private enterprises handle personal data.
The new centres further expand IBM’s global cloud footprint which includes facilities in Mumbai, London, Amsterdam, Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore, Melbourne, Toronto, Dallas and Raleigh, N.C., opened in 2014. This effort includes IBM’s business consulting division, which features thousands of cloud experts with deep industry knowledge who are located around the globe to help clients to move to cloud. IBM consultants are dedicated to working face-to-face with clients to address all of their industry specific needs as they transform to the cloud era.
Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the new facilities offer an array of solutions including proven cloud resiliency services. These services guarantee customers up times of 99.99 percent across any IT environment, including traditional IT, public, private, or hybrid cloud deployments. In the event of an outage, the centers’ support team can recover data in minutes to ensure that is has little to no impact on business operations while going virtually unseen by customers.
Clients around the world are using IBM cloud centres spread across every major market to help them adopt cloud for growth and innovation. Since the start of November 2014, IBM has announced more than $4 billion worth of cloud agreements with major enterprises around the world.
Lufthansa accelerates digital transformation
IBM has signed a seven-year 1 billion Euro outsourcing contract to deliver IT infrastructure services for the Deutsche Lufthansa AG and its Group companies. According to the agreement, which is subject in particular to the approval of the Lufthansa Supervisory Board and antitrust authorities, IBM will first optimize the airline’s IT processes to increase efficiency, which is expected to generate an estimated cost savings by an average of approximately 70 million Euro annually for the Lufthansa Group.
Over the life of the contract, IBM will bring new solutions that incorporate business analytics with mobile computing and social business to enable Lufthansa to offer new services to customers at the same time making partners and employees more productive.
“Outsourcing the IT infrastructure to IBM will strengthen the competitiveness of the Lufthansa Group as a whole. The transformation plan will directly improve our cost base. Together with IBM we will have access to the latest IT technologies not only to lower our cost but also to continue digitalizing our business processes in order to increase efficiency and customer focus,” said Simone Menne, Member of the Executive Board and CFO at Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Chairperson of the Supervisory Board of Lufthansa Systems AG.
In order to strengthen its competitiveness, the Lufthansa Group, with its quality airline brands and its logistics, aircraft maintenance and catering businesses, is realigning the Group’s IT activities. By partnering with Lufthansa AG in this transformation, IBM will first optimize the Lufthansa IT infrastructure for maximum efficiency, make it ready for the innovation of cloud computing and then bring leading technologies in such areas as business analytics, mobile computing and social business to help Lufthansa meet its business objectives.
“By partnering with IBM in its digital transformation, Lufthansa Group has decided to accelerate the move to new technologies such as cloud computing to optimize efficiency,” said Martina Koederitz, General Manager, IBM Germany. “The agreement provides Lufthansa constant access to IBM research and development. This will enable Lufthansa to incorporate the latest technology and innovation into the Lufthansa IT infrastructure including strategic areas such as cloud computing, big data analytics or cognitive computing systems like Watson.”
IBM will begin the multi-stage transformation of the Lufthansa IT landscape by implementing leading edge collaboration and messaging tools for social business, new network and voice services, an optimized electronic workplace solution and IBM’s security framework with its leading edge security solutions and monitoring.
With IBM’s MobileFirst device management framework, Lufthansa Group will also benefit from a global and secure mobile infrastructure allowing Lufthansa to provision, secure and manage mobile devices and apps easily, giving Lufthansa customers and employees simplified access and new capabilities for its reservation systems and business processes.
As part of the outsourcing agreement, IBM will manage Lufthansa Systems’ entire data center operations, help desk and printer services along with individual infrastructure services. Around 1,400 Lufthansa Systems employees will transfer to IBM. Infrastructure services are scheduled to begin from IBM on April 1, 2015.
Improving the accuracy and flexibility of diabetes treatment
IBM is working with Diabetizer, a German -based healthcare technology company, to leverage IBM’s openplatform-as-a-service, Bluemix to build and deploy a first-of-its-kind, cloud-based application that improves care for diabetes patients around the world. The app allows diabetes patients to instantly access and aggregate their health data from multiple devices anywhere in the world, as well as apply advanced analytics to control their blood sugar at precisely accurate levels.
With more than 350 million diabetics worldwide, diabetes remains one of the greatest health challenges of our generation. Working with IBM, Diabetizer is changing the way diabetics cope with managing their disease – many of whom struggle with handwritten plans and blood sugar logs, guessed biometric data, and manual (and often inaccurate) estimates at dosage amounts and times.
Using Bluemix, which is powered by a global cloud platform from SoftLayer, an IBM Company, Diabetizer has built a cloud-based, analytics-driven app, which moves seamlessly between mobile and web interfaces to bring new levels of flexibility and precision to patients, allowing them to:
£ Aggregate blood sugar, nutritional and
health data from multiple input sources
(i.e. smart phone and web apps) into one,
centralized mobile portal accessible from
anywhere in the world – simplifying
records and doctor-patient conversations
£ Tap into the Internet of Things to directly
integrate biometric data from wearable
devices, analyzing physical activity along
with blood sugar levels to gain a more
holistic view of a diabetic’s overall health
“Cloud technology has given us the flexibility and power we need to build an app that combines patients’ most important records into one, easily usable portal,” said Robin Hrassnigg, Diabetizer’s founder and managing director. “Combining this centralized data with powerful analytics, we’re giving the millions of diabetes sufferers around the world the opportunity for greater mobility, more accurate treatment and more freedom from constant calculations and data logging.”
The myDIABETIZER app combines a clear evaluation of blood glucose readings with professional documentation for doctors and diabetologists, automatically importing measurement data and setting key parameters based on individual patient needs.
Additionally, the app synchronizes readings taken by blood glucose measuring devices like iBGStar and GlucoDock with patients’ smartphones, enabling mobile data analysis with advanced analytics software.
Bluemix is one of the Cloud Foundry Foundation’s largest cloud platform implementations, and –since its beta launch in February 2015 - has helped numerous startups such as Diabetizer turn their ideas into mobile and web apps and products.
“Diabetizer, one of the first Bluemix customers in the German-speaking region, is a perfect example of how young companies can take their business ideas forward with a scalable, flexible, global cloud infrastructure,” said Sandy Carter, General Manager of Ecosystem Development at IBM. “Using the cloud to quickly build and bring to market solutions such as the myDIABETIZER app brings a new level of agility to the way we develop – allowing us to build apps which can help alleviate some of our most pressing health issues today.”
IBM signs Cloud agreement with ABN AMRO
IBM and ABN AMRO have signed a 10-year, multibillion-dollar services agreement to manage the IT infrastructure that supports the bank’s operations globally. The agreement includes the implementation of a private IBM cloud together with further standardization and simplification of the existing IT landscape, from mobile computing to mainframe infrastructure.
Through continued optimization and transformation to cloud infrastructure, the bank targets to improve service quality, drive greater operational efficiencies and provide new and innovative products that meet the changing digital needs of its customers globally. This agreement is expected to create financial savings over the life cycle of the contract.
Based in the Netherlands, ABN AMRO serves retail, private and corporate banking customers. This agreement sees the extension of the bank’s strategic IT relationship with IBM. It enables the bank further in their strategy towards a leading digital bank. The new agreement with IBM provides fully managed services for mainframe, servers, storage, end-user computing, help desk as well as application support, and is part of an enterprise-wide transformation initiative at ABN AMRO that is focused on improving profitability by combining customer focus with operational excellence.
“With the transformation of ABN AMRO and the strategic shift we see in the Industry, we will enable ABN AMRO in accelerating time to market, address and improve customer service,” said Piet Bil, IBM Managing Director for ABN AMRO. “With this agreement we will further speed-up the transformation of ABN AMRO enabling the latest technology and services. Through our continued partnership, ABN AMRO will be able to evolve its IT infrastructure with new capabilities that leverage IBM’s investments in cloud, as well as analytics and security.”
Moving to a Hybrid Cloud model
IBM has also signed a 10 year, large-scale services agreement with WOOX Innovations to move key operations to the IBM Cloud, including global supply chain, over 100 business applications and core IT infrastructure services. The agreement will support WOOX Innovations’ goal of achieving its next level of transformation and growth, and will provide it with benefits including efficiencies in supply chain, operations and technology, as well as process enhancements across a diverse set of functional areas.
Headquartered in Hong Kong with approximately 1,900 employees worldwide, WOOX Innovations is a global leader in sound, entertainment and related accessories. Formerly the Lifestyle Entertainment Business Unit of Royal Philips, WOOX Innovations became a part of US-based Gibson Brands Inc. -- which includes Gibson Guitar -- on June 30. As a part of the transition, WOOX Innovations needed to establish a new global IT infrastructure.
“We have chosen to work with IBM as we believe we can differentiate in the market with a global cloud backbone and the expertise of IBM to help innovate and grow our future business,” said Wiebo Vaartjes, CEO of WOOX Innovations.
As part of the agreement, IBM will assist WOOX Innovations in designing and operating a new set of core global enterprise applications on an SAP platform that will manage and run more than 100 integrated business applications on cloud infrastructure from SoftLayer, an IBM company. The IBM Cloud will also host nearly all core IT infrastructure services for WOOX Innovations such as directory services, distributed printing, mobile device management and virtual desktops.
A key objective of the solution design is to use hybrid cloud capabilities to provision business applications and infrastructure from multiple interconnected and secure cloud Points of Delivery – with Hong Kong as the lead hub within IBM’s global data center network – to serve WOOX Innovations’ global footprint across 21 of its operating locations.
With the support from IBM’s global network of local cloud centers, WOOX Innovations will be able to maintain consistency and improve collaboration while streamlining its ability to expand operation overseas.
“We do business in a fast-paced and ever-changing environment from a consumer, customer, supplier and organizational perspective. We expect this partnership with IBM to be a key factor in allowing us to change and adapt in a nimble and effective manner to these changes as we scale globally,” said Ruben Stappers, CFO of WOOX Innovations and the Business
Owner responsible for the business transformation program that is part of the partnership.
“In bringing our cloud and most recent innovations to bear, IBM will strive to assist WOOX Innovations beyond the core enterprise business domains and into the realms of systems of engagement, digital front office, cloud-based product innovations, analytic-driven business management and other leading edge growth-oriented domains,” said Chun Yin Mak, Managing Partner of IBM Global Business Services in Hong Kong and overall IBM Co-Lead Executive for the Partnership.
Nubity Inc. launches Hybrid Cloud management tool
Nubity Inc., has grown from a startup in Mexico City to a global provider of cloud services by partnering with IBM as part of the SoftLayer Catalyst program. The Catalyst program, which is currently being integrated into the IBM Cloud Global Entrepreneur Program, helps startups like Nubity Inc. by providing access to open, secure, scalable cloud infrastructure, executive mentorship and a robust ecosystem of partners and clients.
Nubity provides an on-demand consumption service that helps its clients integrate and monitor public and private cloud deployments – as well as deployments from disparate vendors – through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model based on cloud infrastructure from SoftLayer, an IBM company. With this tool, customers can easy consolidate a view of their complete IT environments with a unique and strategic dashboard. The system provides alerts for preventive and corrective actions and on-time delegation of server management to help customers maintain confidence as they migrate to cloud.
“We have found a technological partner in IBM with which we count on every time we start a new project or a daring idea”, said Dario Peña, CEO and co-founder of Nubity Inc.
Nubity expects 100 percent year-over-year growth through 2015, focusing on clients in Mexico, Colombia and the United States. With operation headquarters in Mexico and Argentina, and with service deployment coverage throughout every country in Latin America, Nubity has grown more than 600 percent since the end of 2012 and serves clients for more than 10 countries in Latin America, Europe and the US, in e-commerce, media, advertising and marketing industries.
“Nubity’s story is a testament to the value that IBM and SoftLayer can bring to startups. Through a comprehensive mix of consulting, a robust ecosystem and scalable global cloud infrastructure, Nubity is helping its clients gain control over their IT environments with an innovative, secure platform,” said Rita Radi, Catalyst Community Development Manager for LATAM, SoftLayer.
Having grown through the SoftLayer Catalyst program, Nubity is now a part of IBM and SoftLayer’s partner programs, giving it the opportunity to take advantage of the consulting, promotional initiatives, entrepreneur forums and IBM’s cloud ecosystem development from each program to drive growth. Also, Nubity participated as a finalist within SmartCamp Mexico 2014 edition, IBM’s global entrepreneurs program. Nubity is now part of a select group of startups in Mexico supported by 500Startups, an early stage investment fund.
Through IBM, Nubity gained access to new markets through IBM Cloud marketplace – a single online destination that brings IBM’s capabilities-as-a-service and those of partners and third party vendors with the security and resiliency enterprises expect. SoftLayer is the only IaaS provider with a single private network connecting all data centers and points of presence. This has enabled Nubity to scale out its cloud infrastructure while taking advantage of SoftLayer’s unlimited private network traffic between all of its facilities to lower its bandwidth costs. “Nubity is one of those fundamental companies for any business seeking to scale their operations efficiently,” said Juan López Salaberry, 500Startups Partner. “Today we see how companies are looking to provide the best customer experience through new models based on the best technologies. Nubity is able to help its clients find that balance.”
“IBM recognizes that businesses and governments need the cloud to help them innovate, grow and operate more efficiently in concert with their existing IT investments,” said Jim Comfort, General Manager, IBM Cloud Services. “Everything IBM does is designed to help companies transition to the cloud in a responsible way at a pace that best fits their business model and industry. Just as we helped major organizations transform in each preceding era of IT,
IBM now serves as the cloud platform for the enterprise.”
IBM announced key cloud investments throughout 2014. In addition to expanding its global cloud footprint and the establishment of the Bluemix PaaS to bring enterprise developers into the hybrid cloud era,
IBM also launched a new Cloud marketplace that brings together IBM’s vast portfolio of cloud capabilities and new third-party services in a way that delivers a simple and easy experience for the enterprise.
The IBM Cloud marketplace serves as a single online destination serves as the digital front door to cloud innovation bringing together IBM’s capabilities-as-a-service and those of partners and third party vendors with the security and resiliency enterprises expect.
Box
New Cloud Data Centres
IBM recently announced the opening of its first cloud data center with SoftLayer in Japan,
located in Tokyo and its first cloud data center with SoftLayer in Germany.
THE FACILITY IN TOKYO complements other SoftLayer resources located in cities within the Asia-Pacific region, including Singapore, Hong Kong, and Melbourne and broadens data redundancy options and geographic diversity within IBM’s growing number of cloud data centers worldwide.
It also addresses the industry’s growing concerns about data residency and privacy by offering a local Japanese facility to compute and store sensitive data that needs to remain in country.
“Since we established a Singapore cloud data center in September 2011, SoftLayer has seen tremendous growth in the Asia-Pacific market,” said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer, an IBM Company. “Our new cloud data center in Tokyo will support this evolving market by offering locally the security, resiliency, and efficiency that customers are demanding around the world.”
The Tokyo cloud data center is launching at an opportune time for IBM Cloud. Between Q3 2013 and Q3 2014, IBM Cloud’s customer base in Japan increased more than 600 percent, and Japanese customers using its SoftLayer Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) now total more than 1,000.
“IBM Cloud’s global expansion of SoftLayer cloud data centers, including the new facility in Tokyo, is good for our business,” said Hiroyuki Mashita, managing director and vice president of PioneerVC Corporation. “We are based in Japan and have clients located all over the world who use our real-time collaboration solution xSync Prime, which relies on SoftLayer’s robust bare metal and virtual cloud servers, services, and worldwide network to provide a low-latency connection. We plan to move some of our clients’ accounts and domestic data into the new cloud data center as soon as it opens in Tokyo.”
The new facility will provide strategic support for local Asia-Pacific customers as well as global customers that want to reach local end users. SoftLayer’s global network, differentiated by its unique network-within-a-network architecture, offers 10Gbps connections to SoftLayer services, less than 50 milliseconds of latency from
the Hong Kong cloud data center, and less than 270 milliseconds
of latency from other SoftLayer cloud data centers around the world.
The Tokyo cloud data center has capacity for thousands of physical servers and offers the full range of SoftLayer cloud infrastructure services, including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage, and networking. It will seamlessly integrate via SoftLayer’s leading private network with all SoftLayer cloud data centers and network points of presence (POPs) around the world.
With services deployed on demand and full remote access and control, customers of the Tokyo center can create their ideal public, private, or hybrid cloud environments to deliver their services with low latency and ultimate efficiency, performance, and low latency.
The new Frankfurt facility provides customers with a local cloud center to help them meet Germany and Europe’s strict security and data privacy regulations, improving application performance by lowering latency for local customers.
“Data privacy regulations in the European Union (EU) are among the most stringent in the world, and Germany has one of the strongest policies,” said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer, an IBM Company. “While all our cloud data centers have SoftLayer’s same strict standards for security and privacy, the new Frankfurt facility will allow German companies and clients to benefit from in-country data storage, a requirement in many industries to comply with German data protection laws.”
The Frankfurt facility is part of SoftLayer’s unique global network, differentiated by its network-within-a-network architecture, and offers 10Gbps connections to SoftLayer services, with only 7 milliseconds of latency from SoftLayer’s Amsterdam facility and less than 330 milliseconds of latency from other SoftLayer cloud data centers around the world. It also complements existing European IBM Cloud facilities in Amsterdam, London, and Parisand broadens redundancy options and geographic diversity within EMEA and around the world by enabling backups that can be replicated and integrated in any other SoftLayer cloud data center, with free unmetered bandwidth between locations.
In Germany, cloud adoption is on the rise, spurred by the cost savings and flexibility gained by moving operations and workloads to the cloud. The number of German enterprises using the cloud grew by 32 percent between 2012 and 2013, and The Experton Group forecasts the value of the cloud market in Germany at €18 billion by 2017. Germany consistently ranks within IBM Cloud’s top five best-performing EMEA countries in terms of total monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and growth. German customers using IBM Cloud’s SoftLayer infrastructure include those in the gaming, digital marketing and advertising, and online and IT services businesses.
The Frankfurt cloud center follows SoftLayer’s standardized pod design, having the capacity for thousands of physical servers and offering the full range of cloud infrastructure services,
including SoftLayer’s bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage, security services, and networking. It seamlessly integrates via the company’s leading private network with all SoftLayer cloud data centers and network points of presence (PoPs) around the world. With services deployed on demand and full remote access and control, customers can create their ideal public, private, or hybrid cloud environments.
