In the recent IBM Global CIO Study of more than 2,500 CIOs around the world, 83% of respondents identified business intelligence (BI) and analytics as the top way they will enhance their organizations' competitiveness and ability to meet client needs.
Moving to address this need for its own employees and for its customers, IBM has announced the world's largest private cloud computing environment for business analytics for use by IBM employees, and has also announced a new solution, the IBM Smart Analytics Cloud, to enable clients to build their own private cloud environments based on the same cloud infrastructure that IBM is using internally.
IBM's own private cloud will provide IBM sales teams and developers new levels of insight to better meet the needs of clients worldwide. Internally called Blue Insight, IBM's cloud environment provides access to client and market data regardless of where an employee sits in the company. It gathers information from nearly 100 different information warehouses and data stores, providing analytics on more than a petabyte (1,000 terabytes or 1,000,000 gigabytes) of data. More than 200,000 IBMers will have access to the new system.
"This new cloud and the insights that our analytics will provide are the next step in the continuous transformation of our business to better serve our clients," states Pat Toole, CIO of IBM. "I expect this first-of-its-kind approach will help drive both new growth opportunities as well as have a significant impact in cost savings, which is exactly the kind of client-focused value that businesses are asking of their IT organizations."
Blue Insight will run on a System z10 mainframe computer with 48 processors (32 processors for production, 18 processors for development and test environments) and strong cryptography-capable of handling up to 10,000 secure transactions per second, with redundant backup support.
In addition to consolidating, virtualizing and delivering its own BI via a cloud model, IBM will offer clients a solution to do the same. The IBM Smart Analytics Cloud is a private analytics cloud solution for large enterprises and provides easily-consumable BI services, systems and software to help customers deliver shared BI services across lines of business and functional organizations.
IBM's own Analytics Cloud deployment served as the template for this solution offering. The IBM Smart Analytics Cloud features: IBM services, including planning and strategy sessions, installation and implementation of the Smart Analytic cloud solution, as well as optimization of the cloud for the enterprise;
IBM Cognos 8 BI, which provides the BI capability for the cloud, offering a broad range of BI services, including reports, analysis and dashboards to monitor business performance, analyze trends and measure results; and IBM System z, supporting the foundation for the cloud with z/VM, industry-leading virtualization running Linux on efficient "specialty engines" for massive scale with secure, multi-tenant operations.
For more information about IBM Smart Analytics Cloud, go here. More information about IBM's cloud computing products and services is available here.