Media Company Agora SA Becomes First Polish Business To Buy IBM POWER7 Systems

WARSAW, Poland, May 6 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Agora SA, one of Poland's largest media companies operating across print, Internet, radio and outdoor advertising channels, has acquired four of IBM's new POWER7 systems to reduce its data center costs and provide better service to its customers by managing millions of data-intensive transactions across its media channels and analyzing that data in real time.

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POWER7 systems offer industry-leading return on investment through dramatic improvements in price/performance, energy savings and virtualization for server consolidation. The new systems can deliver four times the performance and four times the virtualization capability for the same price -- and are three to four times more energy efficient than previous POWER6 systems. The new POWER7 systems are highly-tuned and optimized to help clients more quickly draw insights from vast amounts of data to anticipate emerging business trends, capture new opportunities and avoid risks.

One of the main areas to benefit from the four Power 750 systems at Agora SA will be the group's web services, reaching over 11 million users. The new servers will also support Agora's back-office business processes.

Using POWER7's dynamic workload-balancing and virtualization technologies, for example, Agora will be able to better manage changes in demand for its services while ensuring the maximum utilization of its systems. The new server infrastructure is also expected to result in a reduction in maintenance costs and energy consumption.

"Simplifying IT infrastructure is a top priority for clients like Agora SA who want to focus on running their businesses rather than managing their servers," said Marcin Gajdzinski, General Business Manager, IBM Poland. "IBM's POWER7 servers are designed to help businesses tackle the most data intensive challenges while at the same time creating efficiencies in costs and energy."

The deal was signed in February and IBM's Polish business partner Matic Sp. z o.o. has assisted with the implementation of the new servers.

POWER7 systems support consolidation for UNIX, i and Linux workloads.  By virtualizing the resources on a scalable Power System, the applications can be moved across the entire server, leveraging a dynamic workload-balancing capability.

About Agora SA

Agora SA is one of the largest and well known media companies in Central & Eastern Europe. Since 1999, the company has been listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Agora's portfolio includes newspapers, magazines, internet projects, radio and outdoor advertising, as well as the sale of books with music and movies. The company's flagship product is the "Gazeta Wyborcza" - the largest opinion newspaper in Poland. Agora is also the publisher of the free newspaper "Metro" (the third most read daily in Poland) as well as 14 color magazines nationwide.

For more information on Agora SA go to: www.agora.pl/agora_eng/

About Matic

Matic Sp. z o.o. has been operating on the Polish IT market since 1990. Matic's portfolio includes not only hardware and software, but most importantly supporting companies and institutions to solve their IT problems. Matic specializes in solutions providing: security data storage, reducing the cost of managing growing volumes of data and increasing efficiency of the organization through efficient data archiving system. For more information on Matic go to: http://www.matic.com.pl/

About IBM

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SOURCE IBM