IBM expands business in Japan with new Cloud data centres

14 Jul 2011 Tokyo - IBM has achieved a broad expansion of its Cloud computing services for customers in Japan and in the Asia Pacific region with the opening of a new IBM Cloud Data Center in Japan and a dedicated data centre for LotusLive, IBM's Cloud collaboration service. The new facilities will extend IBM's globally-integrated Cloud delivery network of Cloud computing centres that serve in over 50 countries around the world with centres based in Singapore, Germany, Canada, and the United States; and 13 global Cloud labs, of which seven are based in Asia Pacific - China, India, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore.

The new IBM Cloud Data Center located in Makuhari, Japan delivers IBM's SmartCloud enterprise-class services which include a broad spectrum of secure managed services, to run diverse workloads across multiple delivery methods both public and private.

For the first time, enterprise clients in Japan can select key characteristics of a public, private and hybrid Cloud to match workload requirements from simple Web infrastructure to complex business processes, along five dimensions, including:

• Security and isolation
• Availability and performance
• Technology platforms
• Management Support and Deployment
• Payment and Billing

New offerings will increase customer choice with the potential for end-to-end management of service delivery from the server and operating system to the application and process layer.

It allows customers to expand production along with other workloads like web sites, batch processing, development and test and other initiatives while reducing deployment time from days to minutes via automation and rapid provisioning with over 30% reduction in costs versus traditional environments.

In addition, IBM will open a dedicated data centre for LotusLive, IBM's Cloud-based collaboration services, in Japan. The data centre, which will be available later this year, is designed to allow customers in Japan to more easily move to the Cloud.

LotusLive offers integrated social collaboration tools that combine a company's business social network with capabilities such as file storing and sharing, instant messaging, Web conferencing and activity management. This secure integration allows users to share and edit information, host on-line meetings and manage activities easily inside and outside company boundaries.

The Japan data center is designed to help improve network performance and increase business opportunities for LotusLive users. The centre will allow clients, who cannot take their data outside the country due to security and regulatory compliance, to work in a security-rich Cloud environment.