IBM South Africa announced an expansion of its cloud computing services for clients in southern Africa, with the addition of a new IBM Cloud Data Centre and Cloud Lab, in Johannesburg.
The new additions to the existing Business Continuity and Recovery Service centre (BCRS) will extend IBM's globally integrated cloud delivery network of cloud computing centres that serve in over 50 countries around the world, with centres based in Singapore, Germany, Canada and the US; and 13 global cloud labs.
The new IBM Cloud Data Centre will deliver IBM's SmartCloud enterprise-class services, which include a broad spectrum of secure managed services, to run diverse workloads across predominantly hybrid private cloud delivery methods.
According to Werner Lindemann, Vice-President for Global Technology Services at IBM Sub-Saharan Africa, this is the first opportunity for enterprise clients in South Africa to benefit from hybrid private cloud solutions that offer predetermined service level agreements on a software as a service (SaaS) or utility computing-based model, while also conforming to governance issues of data storage.
According to IDC, worldwide revenue from public IT cloud services exceeded $21.5 billion in 2010, and will reach $72.9 billion in 2015, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.6%.
The SmartCloud offerings enable clients to select key characteristics of a public, private and hybrid cloud to match workload requirements, from simple Web infrastructure to complex business processes, along five dimensions, including:
* Security and isolation
* Availability and performance
* Technology platforms
* Management support and deployment
* Payment and billing
New offerings will increase customer choice, with the potential for end-to-end management of service delivery from the server and operating system to the application and process layer.
The Cloud Lab facility will help businesses, government and research institutions, and institutes of higher learning, to design, adopt and reap benefits of cloud technologies, as well as aid IBM Business Partners cloud-enable their technologies and gain the sales and marketing skills they need to take advantage of this fast-growing market.
Share