CLOUD

Center Will Enable Clients to Manage Unprecedented New Demands From Market: Today, IBM will unveil its ninth cloud computing center worldwide in Tokyo, Japan. The center will give large enterprise customers, universities and governments immediate access to the resources they need to pilot cloud infrastructures and applications, and deliver new and innovative services to their customers. In established markets like Japan, organizations have extensive, mature technology infrastructures that in many cases have become complex and inflexible over years of adding and subtracting pieces. New applications of technology, such as mobile commerce, broadband over power lines, Web 2.0 applications and self-publishing, and real-time data streams, are stretching the capacity of these systems to their limits. The world's information infrastructure was not meant to handle this kind of computing -- especially in mature markets. "We consider cloud computing to be the model that can change the current IT market structure fundamentally, and create paradigm shifts," said Yutaka Miyabe, Director of System Research and Development Center, NS Solutions Corporation. "To spread cloud computing in Japan, it is very meaningful that IBM has launched the first cloud computing center in Japan at this time. NS Solutions Research Center will actively use this center and advocate cloud computing." Cloud computing gives organizations the opportunity to remotely access a vast network of computers that can be tapped on-demand to deliver the kinds of services that consumers today -- and tomorrow -- will insist upon. For example, as broadband Internet and mobile phone networks continue to take the place of the personal computer, traditional telecom companies are forced to offer new kinds of services to billions of users at once. In the future your mobile device will be expected to integrate disparate sources of data and communicate with other devices, knowing not only what kind of music you like, but also where you are right now, if the band you like is in town, buy you a ticket to the show and get you in the door with a digital barcode. Clearly, this requires an immense amount of computing power. "Cloud computing is fundamentally about re-engineering the world's computing infrastructure, to enable game-changing -- even life changing -- applications," said Willy Chiu, Vice President, IBM High Performance On Demand Solutions. "To IBM, cloud computing is much more than the normal evolution of a data center." IBM has dedicated more than 200 full-time researchers and over 100 million dollars over three years in cloud computing, and offers a number of products and services to help clients offer the types of services end users and consumers demand. Built on IBM's expertise in leading massive-scale computing initiatives, Blue Cloud is a set of hardware, software and services that allows IBM clients to offer personal and business services from remote, centralized servers, the "cloud," that share computing resources and bandwidth -- to any device, anywhere. "To develop high skilled human resources in IT field, it is necessary to create latest IT environment in education place," said Hiroto Yasuura, Dean of Graduate School of Information Science and Electrical Engineering, Kyushu University. "Kyushu University is very interested in cloud computing technology, which can provide an on-demand IT environment to our students and teachers. We have been working with IBM, the pioneer of this field. Kyushu University will continue to take advantage of cloud computing technology more actively." The IBM Cloud Computing Center at Japan is yet another example of IBM's rapidly expanding capabilities in cloud computing. IBM launched Europe's first Cloud Computing Center in Dublin, Ireland in March and two more centers in Beijing, China and Johannesburg, South Africa in June. Over the past year, IBM has provided cloud computing services to clients such as Wuxi City of China, Sogeti, the Local Professional Services Division of Capgemini, the Vietnamese government institutions and universities, and iTricity, a utility-based hosting service provider headquartered in the Netherlands. To learn more about IBM's cloud computing initiative, please visit its Web site.