IBM Introduces Efficient, IT-Friendly Service Model

IBM has had its eye on streamlining the way it designs, deploys and manages client’s information technology (IT) infrastructure, and its new service model does just that.

Twenty-five years of experience of working with thousands of businesses worldwide is evidenced in IBM’ (News - Alert)S next generation IT outsourcing services, which help reduce the time it takes to transform a client’s IT environment by more than 60 percent and potentially reduce costs by up to 50 percent.

“IBM has more experience running IT systems than any company in the world,” said Erich Clementi, senior vice president of IBM Global Technology (News - Alert) Services, in a statement.  “Since the first outsourcing engagement decades ago, IT services providers have reinvented the wheel every time they engage with a client. That was an inefficient model wasting both time and money.  By baking our industry-leading expertise, software capabilities, experience and best practices into our services offerings in a standardized, systematic way, we can speed up the time it takes to build the basics. This frees up time for IBM and our clients to collaborate more on solving business problems and explore new possibilities.”

Clients today are facing a whole new set of demands to their businesses because of shifts in the marketplace. They are looking beyond cost cutting, according to IBM, and focusing on how they can leverage IT into their business to stimulate growth, meet customers’ needs and prepare for the future.  IBM’s new service model answers all of these growing concerns.  

“Clients are looking as always for continued efficiency and effectiveness in IT, but they really need to be looking at how do they then use that to grow their business,” Jim Comfort, vice president of portfolio and SO offering at IBM, told TMCnet in a recent interview. “There is so much time spent in services on how we are building things and not on what it does for the business, and that is the transformation the client wants.”

“We believe between the architecture, the software and research IP that we bring to bear that we can have a more effective solution because we really understand the client’s starting point and instead of 60 or 90 days, we can transition in 30 days,” he added.

The new service offers a set of highly engineered assets that combine process, software, industry expertise and IBM research to create reusable building blocks that act as the foundation for IBM’s outsourcing services business, according to company officials. This can be an enormous time saver as clients can choose from a set of pre-configured assets rather than spending precious months designing a server configuration from scratch.

The solution can benefit all types of clients, according to Comfort.

“One of the beauties of the platform thought is if I have the platform I can use it for both small and large businesses,” Comfort said. “The thing that’s becoming more clear to us that many of the challenges that clients are seeing, whether they are large financial company, a large pharmaceutical company or a small manufacturing business, all have a common core of IT requirements that can be met by this idea of a pre-engineered platform as long as it is capable enough from a software standpoint.”

IBM’s outsourcing services also address storage, networking and help desk service needs. IBM designed the assets by taking into account IBM’s experience managing the IT environments for more than 1,000 clients in over 400 data centers in 170 countries.  IBM hopes to help clients achieve faster time to return on investment and improved flexibility which will create more time for employees to work on projects.

The standardized offering was first tested in IBM internally and after deploying its entire storage infrastructure using the standardized asset-based approach, IBM estimates it will lower its storage costs by nearly 50 percent.  

Similarly, BNSF Railway (BNSF) and IBM have teamed to bring more technical innovation and business solutions to reduce costs and support future initiatives.  Through storage optimization and server virtualization, IBM can help BNSF save millions of dollars over the length of the agreement, which will allow investments in innovations that support BNSF’s business. “IBM’s solution enables BNSF to better manage our IT costs, allowing us the opportunity to collaborate in new areas such as cloud computing, analytics, legacy system migration and application management,” said Jo-ann Olsovsky, vice president and chief information officer, BNSF.  “IBM’s solution not only brings us significant cost savings, but also a foundation that promotes continuous innovation.”