Industry giants join OpenID board

THE move towards making portable web identities has taken a giant step forward as five of the industry’s most power companies – Google, IBM, Microsoft, Verisign and Yahoo – joined the OpenID Foundation board.

The companies were appointed as the Foundation’s first corporate members of the board. In its community blog, OpenID said the announcement marked a milestone in the maturity and impact of the organization.

It was quick to add, however, that the corporate membership of the board did not mean the companies could dictate technical terms.

“While the OpenID Foundation serves a stewardship role around the community’s intellectual property, the Foundation’s board itself does not make any decisions about the specifications the community is collaboratively building,” the OpenID blog said.

Last year, OpenID grew substantially, both as a technology and as a community. At the beginning of 2006, there were fewer than 20-million OpenID enabled URLs and less than 500 websites where they could be used. Today there are more than 250 million OpenIDs and well more than 10,000 websites to accept them.

The OpenID Foundation was formed in June 2007 to support and promote the technology developed by the OpenID community. Members include individuals, students, nonprofits, startups and industry giants that have come together to develop and promote open identity management on the Web.

OpenID is free technology that simplifies the online user experience by eliminating the need for multiple user names across Internet sites, enabling individuals to take more control and ownership of their digital identities.

This user-centric digital identity technology helps users reduce the pain of managing dozens, even hundreds, of user names and passwords, and gives users more control over what personal information they share with Web sites when they sign in using an OpenID.

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Industry giants join OpenID board

THE move towards making portable web identities has taken a giant step forward as five of the industry’s most power companies – Google, IBM, Microsoft, Verisign and Yahoo – joined the OpenID Foundation board.

The companies were appointed as the Foundation’s first corporate members of the board. In its community blog, OpenID said the announcement marked a milestone in the maturity and impact of the organization.

It was quick to add, however, that the corporate membership of the board did not mean the companies could dictate technical terms.

“While the OpenID Foundation serves a stewardship role around the community’s intellectual property, the Foundation’s board itself does not make any decisions about the specifications the community is collaboratively building,” the OpenID blog said.

Last year, OpenID grew substantially, both as a technology and as a community. At the beginning of 2006, there were fewer than 20-million OpenID enabled URLs and less than 500 websites where they could be used. Today there are more than 250 million OpenIDs and well more than 10,000 websites to accept them.

The OpenID Foundation was formed in June 2007 to support and promote the technology developed by the OpenID community. Members include individuals, students, nonprofits, startups and industry giants that have come together to develop and promote open identity management on the Web.

OpenID is free technology that simplifies the online user experience by eliminating the need for multiple user names across Internet sites, enabling individuals to take more control and ownership of their digital identities.

This user-centric digital identity technology helps users reduce the pain of managing dozens, even hundreds, of user names and passwords, and gives users more control over what personal information they share with Web sites when they sign in using an OpenID.

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IBM Cloud facility for China

IBM has unveiled plans to open its first Cloud Computing facility in China, giving emerging Chinese software companies the ability to tap into a virtual computing environment to support development activities.

The centre is to be built in Wuxi and will be established through an agreement signed between IBM and Wuxi Tai Lake Industry Investment and Development Company.

The China Cloud Computing Center will be a shared facility providing each software company in the park with its own virtualised computing resource. Such virtual environments can replace the traditional data center model, in which each company owns and manages its own hardware and software.

“Cloud computing is helping to foster the growth of new software companies in China,” IBM Software senior vice-president and group executive Steve Mills said.

“Like many new software companies seeking growth opportunities both locally and abroad, these Chinese software companies will rely on technical infrastructures built on open standards and delivered as a service. This open approach to computing will help them deliver innovation and pursue global market opportunities.”

Cloud computing is an approach to shared information technology (IT) infrastructure in which large pools of systems are linked together to provide IT services.

Cloud computing lets corporate data centres to operate more like the internet by enabling computing resources to be accessed and shared as virtual resources in a secure and scalable way.

The centre will be built using IBM's ‘Blue Cloud’ technologies, a series of cloud computing offerings based on open standards and open source software which link together computers to deliver Web 2.0 capabilities such as mashups, open collaboration, social networking and mobile commerce.

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EU clears IBM-Cognos merger

European competition regulators have given the green light to IBM’s US$5 billion (A$5.7 billion) acquisition of Canada-based business intelligence software developer Cognos.

The European Commission yesterday ruled the acquisition would not significantly impede effective competition.

The Commission examined the effects that the proposed merger would have on the business analytics sector and its various sub-divisions.

“In each instance, the Commission found that the horizontal overlap between the parties' activities would not give rise to competition concerns, since the parties' combined market share would be moderate,” the Commission said in a statement.

“The combined IBM/Cognos entity would continue to face several strong competitors and customers would find sufficient alternative suppliers of such software products,” it said.

The Commission's investigation found no significant risk that the merged entity would be able to close off competitors from the market.

IBM's and Cognos' positions in their respective segments of enterprise application software (EAS) would not provide sufficient incentives to prevent standalone business analytics software vendors from integrating with their EAS platforms.

The acquisition is expected to be completed during the current quarter. Cognos employs 4,000 people globally and generated revenue last year of just under US$1 billion.

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IBM, SAP to join forces

LONG-time technology collaborators IBM and SAP will launch their first joint software product in the fourth quarter, a platform that integrates IBM’s Lotus Notes with SAP Business Suite.

Code-named Atlantic, the software would result in a new style of applications that presents information and data in the context of users familiar with the Lotus Notes desktop.

“IBM Lotus and SAP have thousands of mutual customers who have been asking for the functionality that Atlantic software will provide,” said IBM Lotus Software general manager Michael Rhodin.

“The majority of IBM's top 100 customers also use SAP solutions. We're creating a richer collaboration environment,” he said.

SAP's efforts to better integrate its software with platforms like Lotus Notes is part of a strategy to make SAP products more user-friendly and accessible to more of the employees at companies where it is deployed, increasing its user base.

“This agreement is great example of how SAP enables our customers to empower their users by providing easy access to SAP business processes and data through productivity tools and user interfaces of their choice,” said SAP chief technology officer, Vishal Sikka.

Currently planned for inclusion in the first release of project Atlantic is support for SAP workflows, reporting and analytics, and the use of roles from within the Lotus Notes client.

In addition, tools are planned to be included to extend and adapt these roles and capabilities, and to leverage collaborative and offline capabilities inherent in Lotus Notes and Domino products.

The initial release is planned to ship in the fourth quarter of 2008 and will be sold by both companies.

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Booing IBM stuns Wall Street

IBM has stunned Wall Street with much stronger than expected returns for its fourth quarter, with exceptional growth in international markets.

The company reported fourth quarter revenue of US$28.9 billion (A$32.1 billion), a massive 10 per cent increase over the year-ago quarter.

For the full-year, Big Blue revenue grew 8 per cent to US$98.8 billion.

The company will not release a detailed summary of its Q4 numbers until later this week. But chairman and chief executive Sam Palmisano flagged international markets generally, and the fast growing BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China) specifically as a driver.

“The broad scope of IBM’s global business – led by strong operational performance in Asia, Europe and emerging countries – drove these outstanding results,” Mr Palmisano said.

“IBM is well-positioned as we begin 2008 as a result of our global business reach, solid recurring revenue stream and strong financial position. We are on track to achieve our long-term earnings-per-share roadmap objective in 2010.”

The weak US dollar helped IBM’s results. The company said its revenue growth would have been a still exceptionally strong six per cent had it not been for currency favourable fluctuations.

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IBM unveils supercomputer on a chip

IBM Research has announced a photonics breakthrough that it says will soon allow the power of a supercomputer to be packed onto a single chip.

The company said it had developed way to convert electrical signals into pulses of light. The breakthrough means a chip uses pulses of light through silicon instead of electrical signals on wires.

In addition to putting the extraordinary power of a supercomputer into a single, notebook sized machine, IBM said the breakthrough had obvious benefits of drastically lower power consumption and reduced heat.

He breakthrough would also mean dramatically lower cost, while increasing speed and performance between cores by more than 100 times.

“While today’s supercomputers can use the equivalent energy required to power hundreds of homes, these future tiny supercomputers-on-a-chip would expend the energy of a light bulb,” IBM said in a statement.

In a paper published in the journal Optics Express, the IBM researchers detailed a significant milestone in the quest to send information between multiple cores – or “brains” – on a chip using pulses of light through silicon.

The breakthrough – known in the industry as a silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator – performs the function of converting electrical signals into pulses of light.

The IBM modulator is 100 to 1,000 times smaller in size compared to previously demonstrated modulators of its kind, paving the way for complete optical routing networks to be integrated onto a single chip.

“Work is underway within IBM and in the industry to pack many more computing cores on a single chip, but today’s on-chip communications technology would overheat and be far too slow to handle that increase in workload,” said IBM Research vice-president for Science and Technology, Dr T.C. Chen.

“What we have done is a significant step toward building a vastly smaller and more power-efficient way to connect those cores, in a way that nobody has done before,” Dr Chen said.

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IBM lodges Asus patent complaint

IBM wants the US government to ban the imports of Taiwanese OEM manufacturing giant Asustek, claiming the company infringes IBM patents in a broad variety of its tech products.

Asustek, which is best known for manufacturing PCs, notebooks and other products on behalf of big brand companies, has in recent years established it own ASUS brand in a growing number of international markets.

IBM claims it has made “repeated attempts” to reach licensing agreements with Asustek and its subsidiary in the US, ASUS Computer International.

Big Blue has now filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission outlining three specific breaches concerning patents covering power supply, automatic fan speed control, and computer clustering.

“The infringing Asustek computer products include notebook computers, so-called barebones computer systems, servers, routers and various computer components,” IBM said in a statement.

The US International Trade Commission is an independent federal agency that has the authority to ban the importation of products found to infringe the patents of US companies.

Asustek, which builds products on behalf of companies like Dell and Hewlett Packard, has denied the allegations.

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IBM wins expanded Telstra deal

IT’S not every day that IBM’s global chief rolls into town. So when Big Blue CEO Sam Palmisano blew into Australia for the first time since taking the helm, it was always a good bet that the local subsidiary would make a big announcement.

No surprise that the announcement should involve Australia’s largest company (and a nine-figure number).

IBM said it has expanded its existing seven-year supply chain deal with Telstra, an extension that would deliver $200 million in additional cost reduction benefits to the telecom giant.

Telstra procurement executive director Ian Wheatley said Phase One of the company’s supply chain project with IBM had been a success and the company was on target to save $500 million over seven years.

The next phase of the supply chain transformation program would focus on improving Telstra’s efficiency in ordering, managing and delivering telecommunication parts needed by technicians and engineers to perform network maintenance, fault repairs and activation of customer services.

“In the first phase of our supply chain transformation, we replaced four payment and ordering systems with IBM's out-of-the-box software,” Mr Wheatly said.

“In phase two of the program, IBM will provide a single end-to-end view of our inventory supply chain and enable us to deliver the right part, at the right place, at the right time – improving customer service and reducing costs. This is great news for our customers and shareholders,” he said.

Telstra says it has reduced its procurement costs by $159 million since September last year.

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IBM, Yahoo update free enterprise search tool

IBM and Yahoo! has unveiled an updated version of its enterprise search software, which lets companies customise and personalise searches of information within their organisations and across the web.

The so-called IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition software was launched a year ago to provide a no-cost, full-featured search product that eliminated financial and technology barriers to information access.

Since its launch, nearly 25,000 users have downloaded the software and global organisations of all sizes are using it to improve enterprise search. In addition, numerous independent software vendors (ISVs) and businesses have developed applications that integrate with or support the free IBM search platform.

“Last year, IBM and Yahoo! came together to change the rules of enterprise search, defining a new market standard for search as a core capability that should be ubiquitous and free,” Yahoo! Search Distribution senior director of product management Joff Redfern said.

“We're committed to helping enterprises – both large and small – get more value out of their information quickly and inexpensively, and providing them with an on-ramp to leveraging the power of all their information.”

The new version of IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition provides the ability to create a number of collections, each indexing a different set of documents. This allows the user to limit the search to only the documents from a specific source, providing more accurate results.

It also provides the ability to define additional custom fields in the index allowing field values to be mapped from HTML meta tags, extracted from the document's own metadata, or pushed in from the push API.

The OmniFind Yahoo Edition software is based on the open source Lucene project. The update includes the latest version of the Lucene core.

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Carriers’ security confidence grows

A NEW survey from IBM has revealed security concerns among telecommunication carriers had reduced dramatically in the past two years.

The results of the 2007 State of Security for Global Telecommunications Carriers survey mark a turning point in a competitive industry where the delivery of new services often has come at the expense of security considerations.

A key finding in this year's report reveals that only 36 per cent of survey respondents said security concerns were hindering their rollouts of Internet Protocol (IP) based service bundles including voice, video and data. That number is down sharply from 2006 when 55 per cent of carriers said security concerns were hindering delivery of new services.

“This survey shows what the market is already experiencing from recent mergers and acquisitions, including Verizon/Cybertrust and IBM/ISS: that security is a key ingredient for carriers as they move into next generation services and solutions,” said Current Analysis senior research director for telecom services Counse Broders.

“Clearly, those providers without a security solution in place risk losing their competitive edge.”

Security concerns still plague the telecom market especially in the area of next-generation, IP-based networks (NGNs).

NGNs represent a major evolution in telecommunications involving the convergence of voice, data and video onto one network.

The 2007 Global Telecommunications Carrier survey revealed that the wholesale migration to next-generation, IP-based architectures is imminent, with almost 85 per cent of respondents indicating that they will roll out this kind of architecture in the next five years.

However, fewer than half of respondents (46 per cent) said their companies had a strategy in place for mitigating security risks posed by NGNs.

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IBM unveils Cloud computing plans

COMPUTING giant IBM has announced plans to develop commercial “cloud computing” services based on its expertise in building massively scalable infrastructure using open standards and open source software.

Called “Blue Cloud”, the initiative was demonstrated at an unveiling in Shanghai last week. It aims to deliver infrastructure that lets corporate users operate more like the internet using “a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than on local machines or remote server farms.”

The Blue Cloud offering is a like commercially saleable version of the Google, or EBay-like environments – massive infrastructure built on commodity hardware, open source software and designed from the ground up to cope with widely variable fluctuations in demand.

The systems deliver compute power at low-cost per-transaction cost.

IBM said that its Blue Cloud development is supported by more than 200 IBM internet-scale researchers worldwide and targets clients who want to explore the extreme scale of cloud computing infrastructures quickly and easily.

The company said its first Cloud systems would be offered to customers by mid 2008.

At the event in Shanghai, IBM demonstrated how cloud computing technologies, running on IBM BladeCenters with Power and x86 processors and Tivoli service management software can dynamically provision and allocate resources as application workloads fluctuate.

The company will also offer a System z “mainframe” cloud environment in 2008, taking advantage of very large number of virtual machines supported by System z. IBM also plans to offer a cloud environment based on highly dense rack clusters.

“Blue Cloud will help our customers quickly establish a cloud computing environment to test and prototype Web 2.0 applications within their enterprise environment,” said for IBM Systems & Technology Group senior vice-president for development and manufacturing, Rod Adkins.

“Over time, this approach could help IT managers dramatically reduce the complexities and costs of managing scale-out infrastructures whose demands fluctuate.”

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IBM re-uses scrap silicon for solar panels

COMPUTING giant IBM has unveiled a new semiconductor reclamation process pioneered at one of its US silicon fabrication facilities that lets the company re-use waste silicon wafers to manufacture solar panels.

The company says it has created a “specialised pattern removal technique” to erase the etchings on a silicon wafer in such a way that the wafer can be used to then manufacture silicon-based solar panels.

The semiconductor wafers are thin discs silicon material used to imprint patterns that ultimately become semiconductor chips for computers, mobile phones, video games and other consumer electronics.

The new process has already been awarded the 2007 Most Valuable Pollution Prevention Award from The National Pollution Prevention Roundtable (NPPR).

Previously, waste silicon wafers would be crushed and disposed of as landfill material.

IBM said it intends to provide details of the new process to the broader semiconductor manufacturing industry. The process is currently in use the Burlington Vermont facility and in the process of being implemented at IBM's East Fishkill semiconductor fabrication plant in New York.

“One of the challenges facing the solar industry is a severe shortage of silicon, which threatens to stall its rapid growth,” said Charles Bai, chief financial officer of ReneSola, one of China's fastest growing solar energy companies.

“This is why we have turned to reclaimed silicon materials sourced primarily from the semiconductor industry to supply the raw material our company needs to manufacture solar panels,” Mr Bai said.

IBM says that Semiconductor Industry Association research put the number of silicon wafers started every day worldwide at 250,000. Of these, about 3.3 per cent are scrapped – meaning that over a year about three million wafers are simply discarded.

Because the wafers contain intellectual property, most of these cannot be sent to outside vendors to reclaim, and are instead crushed and send to landfills, or melted down and resold.

"IBM’s commitment to environmental conservation spans its business, from the re-purposing of materials used in semiconductor manufacturing to enabling customers to manage, measure, and run the most power efficient datacenters on the planet,” IBM Semiconductor Solutions general manager Mike Cadigan said.

“The engineering ingenuity that IBM has demonstrated in pioneering the wafer-to-solar panel program has generated countless other conservation initiatives in our manufacturing operations,” Mr Cadigan said.

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IBM boosts security investment

GLOBAL tech conglomerate IBM says it will spend a record US$1.5 billion (A$1.64 billion) next year developing and marketing products specifically for the security market.

The company last week introduced a swag of new security services, products and research breakthrough aimed at helping businesses more effectively manage operational and IT risk.

IBM said the IT security market was being transformed by the growth in more collaborative business models, by more sophisticated criminal attacks, and by increasingly complex infrastructure.

IBM says today’s wide array of security technologies, implemented tactically in silos, are not sufficient to deal with the new risk reality. IBM's approach is to strategically manage risk end-to end across all five domains of information technology security - Information Security; Threat and Vulnerability; Application Security; Identity and Access Management and Physical Security.

“For many enterprises, security is broken,” said IBM Internet Security Systems general manager Tom Noonan.

“The nature of evolving threats is such that installing point solutions to 'keep the bad guys out' is no longer a viable way to secure a business,” Mr Noonan said.

“We advocate new approaches to reduce complexities, adapt to new business imperatives and enable business value versus just threat protection. The path to a more secure world begins with a risk management strategy that limits the impact of threats, improves business resilience and creates an enterprise free of fear.”

IBM's Internet Security Systems (ISS) unit, acquired just over a year ago, is helping lead the way, teaming with IBM Research and integrating with IBM's Software and Systems businesses to deliver the world's most advanced risk management capabilities.

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GSA lets massive US$50b tech contract

IN one of the largest single information technology contracts ever announced, the
US General Services Administration has signed on the dotted line with 29 suppliers for US$50 billion (A$59 billion) worth of IT goods and services.

The so-called Alliant contract is US government-wide acquisition contract (GWAC) that gives federal agencies a centralised source for procuring integrated IT solutions at best price.

The deal, which took more than a year to negotiate, has a five year base, with an option for another five years.

Big winners in the Alliant deal include IT services giants like EDS, CSC, Unisys and IBM, as well as consulting houses like Accenture, BearingPoint and Booz Allen.

GSA serves as a centralised procurement and property management agency for the US federal government, managing more than 20 per cent of the government’s total procurement dollars and influencing the management of US$500 billion in federal assets.

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IBM spruiks mainframe as Green saviour

JUST when the final stake seemed to have been driven through the heart of the ageless IBM mainframe architecture, another reason emerges to keep the Big Iron plugged in: Mainframe are Green.

In what IBM is calling the most significant transformations of its worldwide data centres in a generation, the company says it will consolidate 3,900 computer servers onto about 30 Z Series mainframes running Linux.

The result, IBM says, will be an 80 per cent reduction in the amount of energy required to drive the processing power compared to its current set up. The company says it expects to generate significant savings through the consolidation to mainframes – in lower power costs, and cheaper software and support costs.

As an exercise in ‘eating its own dog food’, IBM wants to demonstrate to potential customers that mainframes are at least part of the answer for companies seeking to reduce power consumption to meet emissions commitments.

The initiative is part of Project Big Green, a broad commitment that IBM announced in May to sharply reduce data centre energy consumption for the company and its clients.

Data centres are voracious users of electricity. IBM has more than eight million square feet of data centre space worldwide – the equivalent of 139 football fields.

IBM says that mainframe systems will be the key to the IT industry successfully reducing its power consumption requirements.

“The mainframe is the single most powerful instrument to drive better economics and energy conservation at the data centre today," said IBM System z mainframe general manager James Stallings.

“By moving globally onto the mainframe platform, IBM is creating a technology platform that saves energy while positioning our IT assets for flexibility and growth,” Mr Stallings said.

IBM plans to recycle the 3,900 servers through IBM Global Asset Recovery Services.

The IBM mainframe's ability to run the Linux operating system is key to the consolidation project, providing an open foundation for a wide variety of applications.

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Green group attacks power consumption

A CONSORTIUM of some of the most powerful names in the tech industry has combined resources to improve the energy efficiency of power-hungry data centers.

The so-called Green Grid is a US-based non-profit that will specifically investigate ways to reduce data centre power consumption, and to improve the life-cycle management of IT products – specifically recycling and the handling of hazardous waste.

The founding board of Green Grid includes hardware and software companies heavily engaged in data centre work – including IBM, HP, Intel, Microsoft, AMD, APC, Rackable Systems, Sun Microsystems and VMware.

The consortium believes energy efficiency in data centres is the single most significant issue facing IT companies and their customers today.

Green Grid members say there has not only been exponential growth in power and cooling costs in the past several years, but that customer demand for concentrated computing was outpacing the availability of clean, reliable power in much of the world.

The Green Grid doesn’t endorse vendor-specific products, instead seeking to provide industry-wide recommendations on best practices, metrics and technologies that will improve overall data centre energy efficiencies.

Network Appliance is the latest large corporate to join Green Grid.

“Our customers are seeing explosive data growth and they are broadening the focus of their long-term data center power reduction efforts to include storage and data management practices,” said NetApp Core Systems vice-president Chris Bennett.

“While we can't eliminate the unending thirst for data, NetApp is helping customers buy and use less storage to drive down their data center’s carbon footprint one byte at a time. Our membership in The Green Grid demonstrates our continued commitment to advancing greater energy efficiency in data centers.”

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IBM Research chief retires

THE IBM Corporation’s most senior research executive Dr Paul Horn is retiring after 11 years in charge of the company’s world-leading research division.

As Senior Vice-President of IBM Research, Dr Horn oversaw the largest and most prolific research organisation dedicated to information technologies.

For the 11 years Dr Horn ran IBM Research, the organisation retained its title as the US’ biggest generator of patents. Spending US$6 billion annually and employing more than 3,000 world-class research scientists and technologists, IBM Research is among the best resourced facilities in the world.

Dr Horn, 60, is credited by IBM with transforming the company’s research organisation “into an engine room of innovation and growth”.

Among the high-profile projects completed through Dr Horn’s period at IBM Research included the development of the Deep Blue supercomputer that defeated chess grand master Gary Kasparov, and Blue Gene, the supercomputer used to better understand human proteins.

He also oversaw the first use of copper and self-assembly in chip manufacturing, as well as huge advances in autonomic computing.

Dr Horn will be replaced by Dr John Kelly, who was most recently IBM Senior Vice-President in charge of technology and intellectual property.

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Big Blue rediscovers appetite for acquisition

US computing giant IBM has rediscovered its appetite for acquisition, buying the Canadian real-time integration and data protection firm DataMirror for US$163.5 million ($187 million) in cash.

DataMirror specialises in software that identifies and captures data that has been added, updated or deleted and allows the changed data to be delivered in real-time to processes, applications and databases.

The DataMirror software ensures continuous, accurate and trusted information is available to decision-makers.

“Organisations need the ability to capture and use information in real-time to help them make better business decisions, better serve their customers and increase operational efficiencies,” said IBM Information Management general manager Ambuj Goyal.

“The combination of DataMirror technology and IBM information management software will help customers bring real-time data analysis closer to actual business processes, allowing them to be more competitive and to generate more value from their information,” Mr Goyal said.

IBM's strategy is to provide customers with the data they need – when they need it – to help them quickly respond to changing market demands, rapidly identify new business opportunities, and improve business results.

For example, with DataMirror technology, a retailer can incorporate information from point of sale systems into a data warehouse in real-time and automatically trigger important business decisions and events, such as replenishing low stock based on current sales and inventory figures.

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IBM signs $1.6 billion outsourcing deal

IN one of its biggest outsourcing agreements of recent years, IBM has signed a seven-year, US$1.4 billion (A$1.6 billion) IT infrastructure services agreement with health and pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca

The agreement renews and extends an existing outsourcing arrangement between IBM and AstraZeneca, which covers the provision of IT infrastructure services in more than 60 countries across the globe.

The new deal also includes the addition of internal tech-related functions within AstraZeneca.

Under the terms of the agreement, IBM will provide a single global technical infrastructure, managing IT services for AstraZeneca across its worldwide organisation – including server and storage hosting, service desks, PC management, network and communications services, including e-mail, and computer operations support.

AstraZeneca retains control of its overall IT strategy and the development and support of its application systems.

AstraZeneca chief information officer Richard Williams said the agreement would provide the company with more consistent infrastructure services globally, which should allow for faster and more efficient roll-outs of new technology.

“In allowing IBM greater autonomy on methods of delivery, the agreement will result in cost efficiencies when compared with running in-house systems,” Mr Williams said.

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