IBM has announced a cloud-basedbusiness analyticsservice to challenge more
established cloud computing players such as Amazon, Google and
Microsoft.
IBM said its private cloud, which is already being used
internally, is the largest of its kind and launches with more than
a petabyte of data.
The
Smart Analytics Cloud service uses this cloud infrastructure to
enable IBM customers to build their own private cloud
environments.
The service will enable companies to consolidate and virtualise
business intelligence using a cloud computing model to save on
hardware and power costs.
The service is aimed at providing business intelligence
services, systems and software to enable businesses to share
business intelligence across the enterprise.
For many companies, this will be an improvement on separate
business intelligence systems for each department using their own
limited hardware and data sources.
Analysts said IBM has lagged behind in cloud services, but still
has the opportunity to take advantage of the cloud computing, which
Gartner predicts will reach up to $3.4bn in sales this year.
Internally called Blue Insight, IBM's cloud environment gathers
information from nearly 100 different information warehouses and
data stores.
IBM said that the system provides its employees in sales,
marketing, product development, and engineering-access to a wide
range of client and market data.
"By turning that data into insight for IBM's sales force and
development communities, IBM will be able to deliver more value in
the solutions and services it offers to its clients," the company
said.
Blue Insight runs on a System z10 mainframe computer with 48
processors and strong cryptography, enabling it to handle up to
10,000 secure transactions a second.