Category Archives: IBM

IBM, Internet of Things, News & Analysis, Texas Instruments

IBM bolsters Internet of Things initiatives

IBM is putting billions of dollars into creating a standalone IoT division

IBM is putting billions of dollars into creating a standalone IoT division

IBM has announced a slew of Internet of Things solutions following a recent pledge to pump £2bn into a series of IoT and cloud initiatives, including the creation of a standalone IoT division.

The company pulled the curtain back on two vertically-focused IoT solutions including IBM Aviation Maintenance, which is designed to optimise the availability and extend the life of critical aviation components; and IBM Product Line Engineering (PLE), a solution to help engineers more efficiently customise product designs for specific markets

It also reaffirmed plans to carve out a section in Bluemix for specialist IoT services (IoT Zone), and announced a number of new IoT-focused cloud services available on the platform: an asset management solution to increase visibility of the condition of assets; a managed continuous engineering platform to help large industrial manufacturing organisations speed up IoT app development, and Workbench, a service for modelling the design and impact of IoT systems.

“The IoT is generating massive amounts of data – data from mobile phones, automobiles, appliances and industrial appliances – that can be captured, analyzed and transformed into actionable insights, in a secure manner,” said Chris O’Connor, general manager, offerings, IBM Internet of Things.

“IBM is helping innovators who design and produce the next generation of connected devices and those who operate and maintain those devices, deal with the increasing complexity of creating products and solutions quickly to meet the needs of consumers,” O’Connor said.

The company also announced a partnership with Texas Instruments (TI) to develop a cloud-based provisioning and lifecycle management service for IoT devices, part of IBM’s plan to ink more IoT-focused strategic partnerships.

“Cloud connectivity and cloud services are fundamental to the IoT, but there are barriers to adoption especially for industrial applications such as manufacturing, building automation and energy management,” said Avner Goren, general manager of strategic marketing, Embedded Processing, Texas Instruments.

“By working with IBM to help secure device identity, provisioning and lifecycle management, we have created a foundation for IoT adoption to reach its full potential through better managed services across easy-to-use connectivity solutions,” Goren said.

The 2nd annual Internet of Things World event to be held in San Francisco in May is due to address some of the challenges ahead of the industry in terms of IoT. Sign up here.

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Enterprise IT, federal government, IBM, News & Analysis, Public Sector, US Army

US Army deploys hybrid cloud for logistics data analysis

The US Army is working with IBM to deploy a hybrid cloud platform to support its logistics system

The US Army is working with IBM to deploy a hybrid cloud platform to support its logistics system

The US Army is partnering with IBM to deploy a hybrid cloud platform to support data warehousing and data analysis for its Logistics Support Activity (LOGSA) platform, the Army’s logistics support service.

LOGSA provides logistics information capabilities through analytics tools and BI solutions to acquire, manage, equip and sustain the materiel needs of the organisation, and is also the home of the Logistics Information Warehouse (LIW), the Army’s official data system for collecting, storing, organizing and delivering logistics data.

The Army said it is working with IBM to deploy LOGSA, which IBM said it is the US federal government’s largest logistics system, on an internal hybrid cloud platform in a bid to improve its ability to connect to other IT systems, broaden the organisation’s analytics capabilities, and save money (the Army reckons up to 50 per cent).

Anne Altman, General Manager for U.S. Federal at IBM said: “The Army not only recognized a trend in IT that could transform how they deliver services to their logistics personnel around the world, they also implemented a cloud environment quickly and are already experiencing significant benefits. They’re taking advantage of the inherent benefits of hybrid cloud: security and the ability to connect it with an existing IT system. It also gives the Army the flexibility to incorporate new analytics services and mobile capabilities.”

AWS, BlueMix, hackathon, IBM, NASA, Watson

IBM, NASA team on cloud, open data app code-a-thon

NASA is teaming up with IBM to host a code-a-thon for developers interested in supporting space exploration through apps

NASA is teaming up with IBM to host a code-a-thon for developers interested in supporting space exploration through apps

IBM and NASA are partnering on the space agency’s Space App Challenge, which will see participating developers build applications that help solve space exploration challenges.

The goal is to get developers building applications that can be used to solve space exploration-related challenges using cloud-based services and publicly available data sets. Some initial applications include a system that uses data aggregators and analytics to help NASA tracks asteroids, and an app that uses senor data streams to guide movement for robots.

As part of the deal IBM will be offering up its Bluemix platform-as-a-service and Watson analytics for developers participating with the three-day code-a-thon, which is being coordinated by the space agency online; more than 10,000 developers are expected to participate across 136 cities.

The company also plans to allocate IBM staff to offer best-practice development tutorials for handling some of its cloud and big data technologies.

NASA is making available datasets from over 200 data sources including services and tools supplied through real-life NASA missions and technology.

“The NASA International Space Apps Challenge is at the forefront of innovation, providing real-world examples of how technology can be used to by the best and brightest developers in the world to solve some of the most daunting challenges facing our civilization,” said Sandy Carter, general manager, cloud ecosystem and developers, IBM.

“Using the IBM Cloud, IBM is making it easier for developers to solve NASA challenges by helping them leverage and make sense of data in ways that wouldn’t have been possible even just a few years ago,” Carter said.

The space agency has previously partnered with other cloud provider on similar initiatives. Last year NASA partnered with Amazon Web Service to host terabytes worth of climate and earth sciences satellite data to promote community-driven research and innovation using its data.

21Vianet, AWS, IBM, Josh Chen, Microsoft, Ralph Haupter

21Vianet, Microsoft renew vows on Chinese public cloud services

21Vianet and Microsoft have extended a partnership to sell Azure-based services in China

21Vianet and Microsoft have extended a partnership to sell Azure-based services in China

Microsoft and 21Vianet have announced the two companies have renewed their partnership to jointly sell Microsoft’s cloud services in China.

The partnership, which now extends until the end of 2018 and will now include Office 365, will see 21Vianet continue to be the exclusive provider of Microsoft’s Azure-based services within China.

“As China’s premier infrastructure provider and cloud enabler, we are extremely excited to extend this important partnership with Microsoft. Since 2012, teams from Microsoft and 21Vianet have worked diligently and seamlessly in the preparation, public preview and commercial launch of both Windows Azure and Office 365 services in China,” said Josh Chen, chairman and chief executive officer of 21Vianet.

“As the growth momentum for cloud services remains exceptionally strong, we believe this partnership extension marks another significant step in solidifying the cooperation between 21Vianet and Microsoft as well as strengthening our leadership role in China’s cloud computing services market,” Chen said.

Microsoft and 21Vianet originally announced their partnership in 2012. Given the stringent data management measures applied to service providers by the Chinese government as well as local business rules, international companies like Microsoft are required to partner with a local service providers if they are to sell their services on the Mainland. 21Vianet also works with AWS and IBM to rollout their cloud services in China.

“We are very pleased to have extended a successful relationship with 21Vianet, following more than 2 years of close collaboration in bringing Microsoft public cloud services to the Chinese market. Both Azure and Office 365 have strong momentum in the market with broad adoption by both local Chinese companies and multinational corporations,” said Ralph Haupter, corporate vice president and chief executive officer of Microsoft Greater China.

“Customers value Azure and Office 365′s enterprise-grade benefits such as security, flexibility, reliability, scalability, openness, cost efficiency and deployment speed. We remain firmly committed to the Chinese cloud market, and we believe this extended partnership with 21Vianet will serve as a strong foundation for both companies to further contribute to the development of the cloud computing ecosystem throughout China.”

According to CCID Consulting, an IT consultancy catering to Chinese businesses, China’s cloud market is on track to reach $6bn by 2017.

Erez Yarkoni, IBM, Infrastructure as a Service, Mark Brewer, Networks, News & Analysis, telstra

Telstra to offer SoftLayer cloud access to Australian customers

Telstra and IBM are partnering to offer access to SoftLayer infrastructure

Telstra and IBM are partnering to offer access to SoftLayer infrastructure

Telstra and IBM have announced a partnership that will see the Australian telco offer access to SoftLayer cloud infrastructure to customers in Australia.

Telstra said that with the recent opening of IBM cloud datacentres in Melbourne and Sydney, the company will be able to expand its presence in the local cloud market by offering Australian businesses more choice in locally available cloud infrastructure services.

As part of the deal the telco’s customers will have access to the full-range of SoftLayer infrastructure services including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage, security services and networking.

Erez Yarkoni, who serves as both chief information officer and executive director of cloud at Telstra said: “Telstra customers will be able to access IBM’s hourly and monthly compute services on the SoftLayer platform, a network of virtual data centres and global points-of-presence (PoPs), all of which are increasingly important as enterprises look to run their applications on the cloud.”

“Telstra customers can connect to IBM’s services via the internet or with a simple extension of their private network. By adding the Telstra Cloud Direct Connect offering, they can also access IP VPN connectivity, giving them a smooth experience between our Next IP network and their choice of global cloud platforms,” Yarkoni said.

Mark Brewer, general manager, IBM Global Technology Services Australia and New Zealand said: “Australian businesses have quickly realised the benefits of moving to a flexible cloud model to accommodate the rapidly changing needs of business today. IBM Cloud provides Telstra customers with unmatched choice and freedom of where to run their workloads, with proven levels security and high performance.”

Telstra already partners with Cisco on cloud infrastructure and is a flagship member of the networking giant’s Intercloud programme, but the company hailed its partnership with IBM as a key milestone in its cloud strategy, and may help bolster its appeal to business customers in the region.

AWS, Channel, Europe, IBM, Ingram Micro, News & Analysis, VAR

Ingram Micro expands cloud marketplace to EU

Traditional IT resellers are trying to rebuild the business model to fit cloud services

Traditional IT resellers are trying to rebuild the business model to fit cloud services

IT tech distributor Ingram Micro has launched a marketplace for cloud services in Europe in a bid to bolster its appeal to channel partners, many of which are increasingly offering their products as-a-service. The move is aimed at making its proposition in the cloud economy more compelling, particularly as other traditional IT vendors and cloud incumbents move in on reseller turf.

The Cloud Marketplace, which handles billing and service deployment for a range of services offered by cloud vendors, is already up and running in the US. But the most recent announcement will see the platform launch imminently in France, the Netherlands, and the UK.

The company said it plans to launch the marketplace in Belgium, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Sweden in the second quarter of 2015.

In prepared remarks the company said it wanted to enable channel partners to more effectively sell their cloud wares to clients, and in particular, exploit what Ingram sees as a growing opportunity in the SME market for resellers. With the Cloud Marketplace, channel partners can manage the complete end-customer subscription lifecycle from a single, automated platform, provided and supported by Ingram Micro, the company said.

“For our channel partners, enabling businesses to operate in a hybrid environment that includes cloud-based solutions is as much about business transformation as it is about technology,” said Carl Alloin, executive director Europe, Ingram Micro Cloud. “Our Cloud Marketplace was designed to help channel partners quickly scale as they seek to expand their footprint and profitability in the cloud.”

Ingram is among a growing number of resellers refitting their channel models for the cloud (Arrow is another big one in Europe that recently launched a cloud app marketplace), in part because other traditional vendors and cloud service providers are starting to threaten their role in the market. Vendors like IBM, which launched its cloud service marketplace last year, are much more willing to cooperate with other vendors they would otherwise compete with at different levels of the stack, while cloud incumbents like AWS are attracting a range of other software and service providers to its fast-growing ecosystem.

Analytics, BlueMix, IBM, Internet of Things, News & Analysis, smart cities, Vendor

IBM to pour £2bn into Internet of Things business unit

IBM is putting billions of dollars into creating a standalone IoT division

IBM is putting billions of dollars into creating a standalone IoT division

IBM announced it plans to spend up to £2bn over the next four years to consolidate and revamp its Internet of Things technologies and services into a standalone business unit. The move seems aimed at broadening its appeal beyond proto-IoT segments it traditionally caters to.

Through its Smart Cities and Smarter Planet programmes the company has effectively been offering what many today refer to as Internet of Things technologies, but the renewed investment will see IBM mobilise and train a massive fleet of consultants (over 2,000) on its consolidated IoT services portfolio, and offer a cloud-based platform for companies to help them marry data real time IoT data streams with other data sets and services.

The company also plans to carve out a section in Bluemix, IBM’s platform-as-a-service, for specialist IoT services, and expand IoT-focused partnerships with a range of technology and service providers.

“Our knowledge of the world grows with every connected sensor and device, but too often we are not acting on it, even when we know we can ensure a better result,” said Bob Picciano, senior vice president, IBM Analytics. “This is a major focus of investment for IBM because it’s a rich and broad-based opportunity where innovation matters.  Over the next decade, integration of IoT in business operations and decision-making will transform business.”

The move is part of a broader reorganisation effort currently underway at IBM, which is seeing the company realign internally (and trim headcount) to more effectively support service and technology development around cloud, mobile, security, and data analytics. Its Internet of Things offerings are both increasingly drawing from those other segments, and broadening beyond traditional smart cities or intelligent manufacturing segments use cases – areas where IBM has traditionally played.

In February for example ARM and IBM jointly announced an Internet of Things starter kit to enable developers to rapidly prototype mbed-based IoT applications using Bluemix, which ships with a development board from Freescale, powered by an ARM Cortex-M4 processor. The companies are aiming the kit at startups, which hasn’t traditionally been IBM’s nor ARM’s target demographic.

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IBM opens SDN, NFV labs in Dallas, Paris

IBM is moving to bolster its service provider business

IBM is moving to bolster its service provider business

IBM has announced the launch of two Network Innovation Centres, where the company’s clients can experiment with software-defined networking and network function virtualisation technologies. The move seems aimed at bolstering its service provider business.

The centres, one in Paris, France and the other in Dallas, Texas, will focus primarily on experimenting with solutions for large enterprise networking systems and telecoms operators, and feature technologies from a range of IBM partner companies including Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Juniper Networks, Riverbed, and VMware.

IBM said facilitating automation and orchestration innovation will be the main thrust of the centres.

“Effectively applying cloud technologies to the network could allow a company to reduce its overall network capacity while increasing utilization by dynamically providing resources during the day in Beijing while it’s nighttime in New York, and vice versa,” said Pete Lorenzen, general manager, Networking Services, IBM Global Technology Services.

“A telecom company could better manage periodic, localized spikes in smartphone usage caused by major sporting events or daily urban commutes, dynamically provisioning capacity when and where it’s needed,” Lorenzen added.

IBM has pushed farther into the networking space in recent years, having scored a number of patents in the area of networking automation and dynamic network resource allocation. A significant driver of this is its service provider business, where some of the company’s competitors – like HP – are attempting to make inroads.

Corey Bell, Datacentre, IBM, Ken King, News & Analysis, Open Compute, OpenPower, OpenStack, Power8, Vendor

OpenPower members reveal open source cloud tech mashups

OpenPower members have been busy creating open source server specs based on the Power8 architecture

OpenPower members have been busy creating open source server specs based on the Power8 architecture

OpenPower Foundation members pulled the curtain back on a number of open source cloud datacentre technologies including the first commercially available OpenPower-based server, and the first open server spec that combines OpenStack, Open Compute and OpenPower architectures.

Members of the open source hardware community, which IBM – the community’s founding organisation – said now numbers over 110 organisations, revealed a number of joint hardware initiatives falling under the OpenPower umbrella.

The Foundation announced the first OpenPower-based servers, developed by Chinese ODM Tyan (TYAN TN71-BP012), a variant of those IBM recently said it would add to its SoftLayer datacentres. The servers will be commercially available in the second half of 2015.

IBM and Wistron also revealed an OpenPower-based server using GPU and networking technology from Nvidia and Mellanox, respectively, which is being aimed at high performance compute workloads.

The foundation also announced the first server spec and motherboard mock-up combining the design concepts of the Facebook-led open source hardware project, Open Compute, with OpenStack and OpenPower technologies, an initiative Rackspace – among other service providers with a vested interest all three open source projects – was keen to bring to fruition.

“Collaborating across our open development communities will accelerate and broaden the raw potential of a fully open datacentre. We have a running start together and look forward to technical collaboration and events to engage our broader community,” said Corey Bell, chief executive officer of the Open Compute Project.

In an interview with BCN earlier this month Brad McCredie, IBM fellow and vice president of IBM Power Systems Development and president of the OpenPower Foundation said there is a big opportunity for Power to succeed in the market, and that IBM hopes to claim up to 30 per cent of the scale-out market in a matter of years.

Ken King, general manager OpenPower Alliances at IBM said: “OpenPower started off as an idea that immediately resonated with our technology partners to strengthen their scale out implementations like analytics.  Now, OpenPower is fundamental to every conversation IBM is having with clients — from HPC to scale out computing to cloud service providers.  Choice, freedom and better performance are strategic imperatives guiding customers around the globe, and OpenPOWER is leading the way.

Chris Moody, Glenn Finch, IBM, News & Analysis, Social media, Twitter, Vendor

IBM says over 100 enterprises creating Twitter-integrated cloud services

Twitter and IBM are jointly deliver solutions leveraging IBM's technology and consulting expertise with Twitter's vast data troves

Twitter and IBM are jointly deliver solutions leveraging IBM’s technology and consulting expertise with Twitter’s vast data troves

IBM said it has over 100 pilots in place that see the company working with enterprises in a range of verticals to create cloud-based services integrated with Twitter. The move comes months after the two companies inked a deal that would see Twitter make its data stream available to Big Blue’s clients.

IBM said the move enables social data-enabled application development via Bluemix, and the ability to combine predictive analytics and Watson services with Twitter data in compelling ways.

The company also said it has over 4,000 service professionals well-versed in Twitter data integration who are on hand to help enterprises integrate Twitter in their applications

“So much of business decision making relies on internal data such as sales, promotion and inventory. Now with Twitter data, customer feedback can easily be incorporated into decision making,” said Chris Moody, vice president of data strategy at Twitter. “IBM’s unique capabilities can help businesses leverage this valuable data, and we expect to see rapid demand in retail, telecommunications, finance and more.”

Glenn Finch, global leader of big data & analytics for IBM Global Business Services said: “The unprecedented partnership between IBM and Twitter helps businesses tap into billions of real-time conversations to make smarter decisions. Through unique expertise, curation and insights Twitter data is now able to inform decision-making far inside organizations”

IBM and Twitter originally announced the collaboration, which focuses on three distinct areas, in October last year, making IBM one of just a handful of companies to have full access to Twitter’s entire data stream.

Twitter offered up its data for developers to integrate into their big data applications built on IBM’s Watson Developer Cloud or Bluemix.

IBM and Twitter said they would jointly develop enterprise applications that integrate Twitter data with IBM’s customer engagement solutions (ExperienceOne) that help users map sentiment behaviour in real-time.

And the companies also planned to jointly develop solutions for specific industries such as banking, consumer products, retail, and travel and transportation, with IBM throwing its vast consulting resources behind the effort.