IBM's sweeping initiative to address major shift in world's data flow - UPDATED

Tony Austin
Tuesday, 09 September 2008 11:00

Opinion and Analysis

Through home-grown innovation, development and acquisitions, today's announcement marks a $2 billion investment, three years of research and development, and a global team of more than 2,500 storage technical professionals, engineers and researchers from nine different countries including France, Germany, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, Switzerland, United States, and the United Kingdom. Key acquisitions of XIV, Diligent, Cognos, Arsenal, Optim, FilesX, Softek, and NovusCG over the last 24 months add strategic pieces to the strongest ever information infrastructure portfolio of offerings unveiled today.

"The world is re-tooling its underlying IT infrastructure in a dramatic shift away from a decades-old client/server model to a radically more efficient Internet-style architecture. This requires different thinking and new capabilities, which we are addressing in this information infrastructure launch, with our investments going forward, and how IBM will do business with our clients," said Andy Monshaw, General Manager, IBM System Storage.

 "There is no bigger opportunity for our clients than to unlock the value they have in their data centers and help them create smart, innovative offerings for their end users -- the consumer. IBM is the only company in the world -- not HP, not EMC, not Sun -- with decades of research, industry knowledge, market leadership and the end-to-end capabilities to make this a reality for our clients."

To help clients accelerate their data center transformation initiatives and integrate these new IBM information infrastructure offerings into their data centers, IBM is also announcing the global opening of the New Enterprise Data Center Leadership Centers.

At these new centers, more than 500 IBM engineers and experts across locations in the U.S. and Europe will work with clients and focus on solutions and best practices around energy efficiency, consolidation and virtualization, business resiliency and security and service management and information infrastructure. More information can be found here.

"These new tools and offerings for the IBM information infrastructure will allow clients to streamline their data centers with highly integrated storage offerings focused around archive, compliance, retention, and security pain points to help clients deliver information as a service to their customers -- the consumers, who are looking for access to information at any time from any device.

These tools and technology resources which IBM has been developing and amassing, open doors to new industry collaborations, and on demand storage technologies -- a key pillar in the emergence of cloud computing."

For me personally, it's great to see my old employer (I retired in the 1990s) still releasing leading-edge solutions for the enterprise while being acutely aware of the technology needs of the individual.