IBM Expands PureSystems Family to Help Clients Tame Big Data

SINGAPORE and ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 9, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- To help global organizations make sense of the massive influx of data being created daily, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today expanded its PureSystems family of expert integrated systems with the introduction of PureData System. Now, clients can more efficiently manage and quickly analyze petabytes of data in minutes and intelligently use those insights to support specific business goals across their organization including marketing, sales and business operations. (#IBMPureSystems)

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20121009/NY88702 )
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20090416/IBMLOGO )

Organizations across all industries are challenged to find simpler and more cost effective ways to analyze data and better understand consumer purchases, manage customer churn, perform data-intensive marketing campaigns and detect fraud in real time. The PureData System is available in three workload-specific models optimized for transactional, operational and big data analytics to help clients solve these challenges.

The PureData System is the next step forward in IBM's overall strategy to deliver a family of systems with built-in expertise that leverages its decades of experience to reduce the cost and complexity associated with information technology. Clients can have the system up and running in 24 hours, not 24 days, run complex analytics in minutes, not hours, and handle more than 100 databases on a single system.

IBM estimates that 2.5 exabytes of data is created every day — so much that 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. Given this data deluge, clients can use the new PureData System for high performance data services for traditional or cloud environments. The new system builds on the initial PureSystems family of offerings that can deploy Web applications in less than 10 days, a task that once took at least six months. The PureSystems family is the result of $2 billion in R&D and acquisitions over four years.

"We are on the leading edge of a new era of computing where clients can process vast amounts of information in real time and in ways that can fundamentally transform how business gets done. To accelerate this transformation, we need to simplify and speed the deployment of new capabilities – and greatly reduce the cost of IT operations," said Arvind Krishna, general manager, IBM Information Management. "Today's introduction of the PureData System is an important step in our journey as we help clients achieve new levels of speed, simplicity and savings."  

IBM is unveiling three workload-specific models of the PureData System:

• PureData System for Transactions: Retail and credit card processing environments depend on rapid handling of transactions and interactions. These transactions may be small, but the volume and frequency require fast and efficient environments. The new system provides hardware and software configurations integrated and optimized for flexibility, integrity, availability and scalability for any transaction workload.
• PureData System for Analytics: For today's organizations to be competitive, they need to quickly and easily analyze and explore big data—even when dealing with petabytes. The new system simplifies and optimizes performance of data warehouse services and analytics applications. Powered by Netezza technology, the new PureData for Analytics system is designed to accelerate analytics and boasts the largest library of in-database analytic functions on the market today. Clients can use it to predict and help avoid customer churn in seconds, create targeted advertising and promotions using predictive and spatial analysis, and prevent fraud.
• PureData System for Operational Analytics: The new system can deliver actionable insights concurrently to more than 1,000 business operations to support real-time decision making. Operational warehouse systems are used for fraud detection during credit card processing, to deliver customer insights to call center operations, and track and predict real-time changes in supply and demand for energy and utilities.

The Premier healthcare alliance has selected a PureData System to manage and analyze the nation's largest clinical, financial and outcomes database with information on one in every four patient discharges, 2.5 million real-time clinical transactions a day and $43 billion in annual purchasing data. 

"One of our biggest challenges has been the ability to quickly acquire and analyze big data, then place the insights from that data directly into the hands of caregivers," said Todd Wilkes, vice president of Enterprise Solution Development at Premier, a provider-owned alliance helping 2,700 hospitals and 90,000 other health providers improve their patient care and finances. "With IBM big data analytics, we can now analyze any data with sub-second response times and share insights from it to help our alliance members improve patient care, reduce costs and better understand what's going on within their hospitals and health systems."

IBM Business Partners Help Drive PureSystems Adoption

As IBM expands its family of expert integrated systems, the IBM Business Partner ecosystem embracing PureSystems also continues to grow. Numerous partners such as DynaFront Systems and PCCW Solutions are installing PureSystems in their own datacenters to deliver value to clients. Additionally, more than 60 Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) have already committed to support PureData System.

Through technical and validation resources, IBM offers these companies the flexibility to optimize their industry-leading applications to run on PureSystems. Silvermoon Business Systems, a South African ISV focused on the insurance industry, is already seeing performance results by reducing the typical deployment time of their application from two weeks to 18 minutes with PureApplication System.

This announcement builds on last week's news to further expand IBM's cloud ecosystem with a set of global initiatives, enabling organizations to develop solutions and services on IBM PureSystems, built on open standards. As more clients embrace cloud computing, they are looking to Managed Service Providers (MSP) to help them quickly develop cloud-based services in a more simplistic, secure and economical way. 

To date, partners have delivered more than 200 solutions and applications that are optimized to run on IBM's expert integrated systems. Building on these offerings, IBM is also introducing several new patterns designed to radically streamline the set-up and management of hardware and software resources. This includes patterns for social business, asset management and business process management. These patterns and solutions, which span 20 industries, can be accessed through the IBM PureSystems Centre.

Today's news expands on the April 2012 introduction of IBM PureSystems, which includes PureApplication and PureFlex Systems. The new systems family offers clients an alternative to current enterprise computing models, where multiple and disparate systems require significant resources to set up and maintain. The PureFlex System enables organizations to more efficiently create and manage an infrastructure, while the PureApplication System helps organizations reduce the cost and complexity of rapidly deploying and managing applications. In addition to the common web application patterns supported by PureApplication System, the combination of both PureData and PureApplication Systems can now be used for end to end transaction workloads.

Pricing and Availability

PureData System will start shipping to customers at the end of October.

Credit-qualified clients that elect financing can see immediate benefits with PureData System by deferring their first payment until January 2013¹ or obtaining a 0 percent Interest-free loan for 12, 24 or 36 months.²

For more information about these offerings, visit: http://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/ and http://www.ibm.com/PureSystems/PureData/.

To view IBM's online press room, visit: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/37399.wss. To view IBM YouTube Analytics Channel, visit: http://www.youtube.com/user/ibmbusinessanalytics.

1.  Interest continues to accrue on deferred payments. Offer applies to fair market value (FMV) lease only.

2.  Offer applies to purchases of IBM PureApplication or PureData Systems only, and does not include subscription and support or additional add-ons.  Offer may vary by country and expires December 15, 2012.  

IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, PureSystems, PureFlex, PureApplication, Smarter Planet and the planet icon are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation, registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. For a current list of IBM trademarks, please see www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml

IBM Global Financing offerings are provided through IBM Credit LLC in the United States and other IBM subsidiaries and divisions worldwide to qualified commercial and government clients. Rates and availability are based on a client's credit rating, financing terms, offering type, equipment and product type and options, and may vary by country. Other restrictions may apply.  Rates and offerings are subject to change, extension or withdrawal without notice and may not be available in all countries.

All other company, product or service names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of others. Statements concerning IBM's future development plans and schedules are made for planning purposes only, and are subject to change or withdrawal without notice. Reseller prices may vary.

SOURCE IBM