Phase 2 International Picks IBM Servers

Phase 2 International, a vendor of Software as a Service products, has chosen IBM (News - Alert) servers for its Microsoft Dynamics CRM hosting capacity “while reducing energy use by more than 65 percent.”

 

Based in Honolulu, Phase 2 sells IT products for small and medium-sized companies; following the Software as a Service “leave the driving to us” model. For a monthly fee, businesses can use Phase 2’s products to access IT business applications such as hosted Microsoft (News - Alert) Dynamics CRM for Customer Relationship Management, Microsoft Team Foundation Server for collaborative project development, document management, Web conferencing, e-mail, and other cloud computing services.

 

Phase 2 officials say their business has “doubled in the first six months of 2008.” To provide its clients with Microsoft CRM, Phase 2 uses four-way, quad core IBM x-series 16 2.4 GHz processors with 64 GB of RAM and 3 TB of shared storage, scaling to 15 TB in Q1 of 2009.

 

Last month Phase 2 announced today the latest in its cadre of business productivity products, ActiveSync for BlackBerry (News - Alert), described by company officials at the time as a “low-cost alternative to traditional BlackBerry Enterprise Server subscription service.”

“all of the same functionality -- and more -- for less,” according to Phase 2 officials.

 

Available to Phase 2 Microsoft Exchange clients, and priced based upon user license quantity, the product includes secure wireless e-mail, PIM synchronization, Global Address Look Up capability and more. The client downloads over the air and installs automatically on the user’s device for BlackBerry synchronization. It provides its own e-mail box, and accesses the native BlackBerry Calendar, Contacts, and Task applications.

 

The IBM servers are advanced server virtualization technology with their iSCSI network-attached shared storage. Phase 2 officials say they improve the security and reliability offered.

 

“As their Microsoft CRM server needs grow, Phase 2’s clients can easily expand from four to sixteen sockets, so higher costs only have to be met as needed,” Phase 2 officials say.