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IBM has opened a multimillion-dollar high-performance software and services laboratory in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
The new HiPODS (High Performance On Demand Solutions) Lab joins a grid of specialized IBM facilities in six countries: China, India, England, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The HiPODS Labs are part of a newly specialized Lab Services area within IBM that generates 5 percent of its software revenue, and which has been growing rapidly during the past five quarters.
“With significant growth in the overall economy comes the need for sophisticated IT capabilities that can scale up to sustain rapidly expanding and shifting workloads,” Willy Chiu, the vice president of HiPODS at IBM, told eWEEK on Sept. 5.
Through automation and virtualization, IBM HiPODS could help clients extend their IT performance by wringing the most out of their infrastructures, a critical foundation for growth, he said.
The HiPODS are connected through a global collaboration vehicle known as the HiPODS Global Innovation Grid, which pools servers and software together to provide infrastructure.
The grid allows IBM to create a project team in minutes, assign servers and storage for a project in less than an hour, dynamically provision software components, connect global talent pool teams through blogs and wikis, and, most importantly, reuse assets developed for one client with hundreds of other global clients anywhere in the world, Chiu said.
This global grid also creates a faster path to innovation for customers, as it allows them to focus on implementing new technologies rather than worrying about the infrastructure challenges of major IT projects, he said.
A key element of the HiPODS mission is to aggregate real-market client experiences from all parts of the globe, analyzing the data and turning this knowledge into insight and reusable software and service assets, he said.
“The more robust and well-rounded the client experiences, the more insightful the network of 200 HiPODS personnel across the six labs will be. U.S. companies can tap into this network from the Silicon Valley Lab,” he said.
Services based on SOA (service-oriented architecture) are pooled to manage and virtualize these resources, and collaboration tools allow HiPODS teams around the world to use the servers and SOA Web services, as well as to share their expertise as a single, collaborative team, he said.
Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive for IBM software, attended the opening of the Brazilian lab Sept. 5, saying in his address there that the Peoples Bank of China had one of the first SOA implementations in that country and was transforming its business practices in IT to achieve higher levels of efficiency and flexibility in its business.
“Theyre unifying and integrating many of the applications across 30 different provinces within China, and hundreds of banks … We have the ability to bring in lot of the deep skills across the worldwide location, and help them achieve a much higher performance than they will ever need by pushing the envelope and the message rate to over 2,000 transactions per second. They are extremely excited about the ability to leverage SOA in transforming how they conduct business,” he said.
Online retailer eBay had engaged HiPODS at the Silicon Valley lab to help it meet the demands of 200 million users and 2 billion page views per day, while NIWS in Japan was one of the first adopters of a request-driven provisioning, which allowed it to automate its infrastructure management so it could deliver its services to its customers, particularly in the health care area, much more effectively, Mills said.
The HiPODS Labs have also developed a Web-based service for evaluating the performance of workloads based on an SOA, for common scenarios such as banking, travel booking and insurance claims handling, Mills said.
The Brazilian lab is designed to support the growth of business across the emerging markets of Latin America by helping solve the most vexing business and technology questions.
The lab will provide businesses with access to servers, storage and top IBM talent in Brazil and around the world, depending on the specific needs of the client, he said.
“We are bringing IBMs deepest software and consulting capabilities into the heart of our fast-growing client base in Brazil and to the accelerating economies across Latin America. This lab will help local clients by providing a network of worldwide high-value solutions to transform their businesses,” Mills said.
With its strong double-digit year-to-year revenue growth, IBM Brazil “will have no shortage of customers to serve,” he said.