IBM Enhances Service Portfolio

Information technology major IBM announced significant enhancements to its services portfolio that streamline the way it designs, deploys and manages a clients' IT infrastructure.

The standardized approach from IBM's (News - Alert) IT outsourcing services can reduce the time it takes to transition a client's IT environment by more than 60 percent and reduce management costs by up to 50 percent.

The new set of engineered assets integrates process, software, industry expertise and IBM Research know-how to create reusable service components, according to company officials.

These new capabilities are based on IBM's experience managing the IT environments for more than 1,000 clients in over 400 data centers. The pre-engineered technology service model assists clients to achieve faster time to return on investment and improved flexibility, while freeing up time and resources to focus on innovative projects.

“By infusing our industry-leading expertise, software capabilities, experience and best practices into our service offerings in a standardized, systematic method we can speed up the time it takes to do something very complex in a very reliable way,” said Erich Clementi, senior vice president, IBM Global Technology (News - Alert) Services, in a statement.

“This frees up time for IBM and our clients to collaborate more on innovative solutions to business challenges and exploring new possibilities,” Clementi added.

Clients are shifting demands on IT to drive business value because of the velocity of change and acceleration of global expansion. They are looking at leveraging IT into their business to ensure growth, meet clients' needs and prepare for the future.  IBM's standardized approach integrates a client's business processes with IBM's services assets to incorporate technologies, such as cloud computing.

IBM began testing the standardized offerings on its internal systems.  By deploying its entire storage infrastructure using the standardized asset-based approach, IBM estimates it will lower its storage costs by nearly 50 percent.

Recently, SAP and IBM announced the first official performance results of SAP (News - Alert) In-Memory Appliance (SAP HANA), finding that the software easily handles 10,000 queries per hour against 1.3 terabytes of data, returning results within seconds.