IBM has broadened its remote Virtual Server Services,
which had been offered only on its zSeries servers, to include the
rest of its eServer line - iSeries, pSeries and xSeries servers -
with support for Windows, Unix and Linux.
The company is also adding applications to its on-demand
computing services under an application service provider model.
Officials said IBM had inked an agreement with Siebel Systems to
offer CRM services in this manner.
An IBM data centre in Colorado houses the systems, which users
can access remotely on a pay-as-you-go basis. The service will
gradually be expanded to other IBM facilities around the world, and
US companies could eventually have their day-to-day business
applications residing on servers outside the country.
Mike Riegel, manager of IBM's e-business hosting services, said
that outside of regulated industries such as healthcare and
financial services, the use of offshore data centres can work.
"There is a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt about
cross-border delivery," said Riegel. "But when you really dig into
the regulatory environment, there aren't many impediments to
it."
Multinational companies run data centres all over the world. But
the idea of turning part or all of a company's data centre
operations over to an offshore provider is still in its
infancy.
Some companies are beginning to use offshore service providers
to manage and monitor their data centres remotely in low-cost
countries while keeping the hardware and data in North America and
Europe.
Early adopters of offshore outsourcing of IT systems, as opposed
to application development, are focusing on remote monitoring,
database administration and other systems administration
functions.
But analysts and offshore service providers say they have not
seen firms relocating data centre hardware offshore. Companies
maintain that although such a move probably is not worth the
migration expense, they may use hardware located offshore through
an outsourcing supplier.
But there are many elements affecting a decision to outsource
infrastructure operations offshore, including network reliability,
geopolitical concerns and security. It remains "more of a niche and
still a slowly evolving process", said Richard Matlus, research
director at Gartner.
But offshore aside, infrastructure outsourcing is growing in the
US, and offerings are expanding. Last week, Sun Microsystems
Incstruck an agreement with SchlumbergerSema for outsourced,
pay-as-you-go services.
Schlumberger will use Sun servers to provide services targeting
the energy, finance, telecommunications and government sectors. The
servers can be hosted at the customer's site or Schlumberger's data
centre.
While these data centre services can be provided anywhere, "the
barrier is the customer comfort to sending something offshore",
said Ashif Dhanani, director of utility computing at Sun.
Meanwhile, Kumar Mahadeva, chief executive officer of offshore
services provider Cognizant Technology Solutions, said he is seeing
business processes such as claims processing go overseas, resulting
in the creation of offshore data centres to support those
operations.
Patrick Thibodeau writes for Computerworld