IBM Helps Clients Simplify Their IT to Better Compete in a Digital Economy

LAS VEGAS, May 4 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- At the IMPACT 2010 conference, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new products and services designed to simplify the way that clients manage their IT environments by delivering specialized capabilities associated with cloud, integration and scalability. Included in the announcement are three new appliances that are optimized and will allow clients to enhance and amplify the core technologies that provide the backbone that powers today's digital economy.  

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Organizations today are looking to create dynamic networks of partners, suppliers and customers, in order to be better positioned to take advantage of new growth opportunities and changing market conditions. Today's announcement provides clients with the tools to meet these needs and is another example of how IBM is helping clients accelerate value and lower cost by removing the complexity of deploying and managing of their IT environments.  

These simplified environments are essential as organizations of all sizes seek to optimize their IT infrastructures and streamline their datacenters in order to better compete in the global marketplace. IBM WebSphere Appliances are easy to install, purpose-built network devices to simplify, help secure, and accelerate a client's XML and Web services deployments.

The new appliances announced today are:

• WebSphere DataPower Integration Blade XI50B: now available on the IBM BladeCenter, the appliances are easy to deploy network devices aimed at untangling the costly and rigid complexity of point-to-point integration.
• WebSphere DataPower XC10: A new appliance that amplifies a client's ability to cost-effectively extend application performance with a "drop-in cache".
• WebSphere Cloudburst Appliance:  A version of the appliance that improves a client's ability to create, deploy and manage WebSphere environments in a cloud, now including environments required to automate business processes and choreograph related services.

These new appliances complement the recently announced addition of Cast Iron Systems to the IBM portfolio. This combination will extend IBM's market leadership in this segment by offering clients a complete platform to integrate cloud applications from providers including Salesforce.com, Amazon, NetSuite and ADP with on-premise applications, such as SAP and JD Edwards.  Using Cast Iron Systems' hundreds of pre-built templates and services expertise, expensive custom coding can be eliminated allowing cloud integrations to be completed in the space of days, rather than weeks or longer.  These results can be achieved using a physical appliance, a virtual appliance or a cloud service.  

As part of today's announcements IBM also detailed:

• A new industry leading benchmark for WebSphere Application Server from SPECJEnterprise2010. This test is the latest and most pertinent benchmark for businesses developing modern applications that leverage Java EE 5.0 for streamlined development to dramatically reduces costs, improve performance and speed time-to-value. In this new result, IBM showed a 72 percent improvement over its previous industry leading result posted in January.
• A new initiative called "Akamai Ready," that will ensure optimal technology configurations and integrations between WebSphere products and Akamai's Web application acceleration services. Akamai provides market-leading managed services for powering video, dynamic transactions, and enterprise applications online.
• A new SOA Repository Standard - Working with other vendors, IBM continues to advance SOA standards and is announcing SOA Repository Artifact Model & Protocol or S-RAMP that helps customers simplify their IT environments through increased interoperability.

IBM's Global Technology Services is also announcing Rapid Deployment Services (RDS) for Middleware. These automated deployment services for complex multi-product middleware solutions speed the installation of applications by up to 80 percent over manual installation.

"Delivering banking services to our clients securely and efficiently is a top priority for Westpac," said Glenn Bowden, of Westpac, Australia's largest banking institution that recently used RDS to reconfigure mainframe applications.  "IBM's Rapid Deployment Services enabled us to move smartly and nimbly -- while also saving on costs."

For more information on how IBM is helping clients meet the challenges of a dynamic marketplace visit: www.ibm.com/software.

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SOURCE IBM