New IBM Delivery Center Opens in Costa Rica

Features cloud computing center of competency



High value information technology services to focus on service management, security, data storage and business analytics


Support for IT professional training in universities

IBM (NYSE: IBM) officially opened today its new Costa Rica Delivery Center, in America Free Zone, Heredia. IBM will invest US$300 million over 10 years, and intends to employ up to 1,000 people by 2014. The new center will provide high-value services for clients around the world, reaffirming Costa Rica’s position as a strategic services hub for IBM. The facility will support clients in the areas of IT security, data storage, business analytics, cloud computing, and other services in demand by IBM clients.

The new center will provide cloud infrastructure support and management, to help clients simplify and enhance operational efficiency. Cloud computing provides clients with the ability to reduce their IT infrastructure costs, have a standardized, virtualized platform, and enhance their process automation. Additionally, the center will provide technology capabilities that can anticipate and help prevent fraud and IT hacker attempts.

IBM IT experts will support global clients with service management, data storage services, automating data backup and providing support for a variety of storage platforms and tools. Business analytics capabilities will help clients analyze complex data and enable smarter decision-making.

“With IBM’s state-of-the-art facilities, thousands of Costa Ricans will be able to showcase their talent, pushing Costa Rica further down the path of innovation, knowledge and technology; a path that we have bravely undertaken with courage and commitment, but most of all, with great confidence in the talent of our people,” said Costa Rica President Laura Chinchilla.

“This partnership between IBM and Costa Rica, as we engage in this adventure towards a more modern and technological world, is essential to our country. It becomes our driving force while reminding us of the important challenges that lie ahead,” added President Chinchilla.

IBM has services professionals in more than 170 countries with the industry’s largest number of infrastructure experts. The center in Costa Rica opens new opportunities for IBM clients in Latin America. With this center, IBM expands the local services operations it has been delivering since 2004, in the areas of human resources processes, call center, finance and administration, and shared services.

“This opening is very important for IBM, as our global services are a key differentiator from our competitors,” said Patt Romero Cronin, General Manager, IBM Global Technology Delivery. “The cloud computing capabilities of the new center, combined with cloud-based support provided by IBM from the United States, India and China, are important to our clients.”

“The IT services that IBM will deliver from Costa Rica require complete fluency in new and innovative technologies, which will bring along a significant technology transfer and will allow us to strengthen and scale our participation in global chains of high-value technology,” said Anabel González, Costa Rica Foreign Trade Minister.

IBM Collaborates with the Costa Rican Education System

IBM also announced that it is pursuing efforts to build skills in Costa Rica. IBM is working jointly with the public and private universities, Costa Rica Investment Promotion Agency (CINDE) and the government. The aim is to provide academia with technology, knowledge and access to specialized software to improve training and education, and to strengthen the curricula of IT programs around four main themes: cyber security, cloud computing, data storage and business analytics. The purpose of the IBM University Program is to provide students with new information technology skills that are in high demand in Costa Rica.

“The Ministry of Science and Technology is fully committed to aligning academia and the IT industry for development in strategic areas such as digital technology,” said Alejandro Cruz, Costa Rica Minister of Science and Technology. “The articulation between academia and industry will provide the opportunity to improve technical and higher education in more advanced skills of computing science and technology. This initiative, I am sure, will have full support from the main public and private educational institutions, which will allow our human capital to strengthen the competitiveness of Costa Rica for its future development.”

“Strengthening our skills and access to new technologies, such as the ones used by IBM, will improve the country’s competitiveness as a location for foreign direct investment,” said Gabriela Llobet, CINDE Director General. “It will portray our country as more innovative and open to learning new technologies, setting us apart from our regional competitors and raising us up to the highest level worldwide.”

IBM will offer access to IBM tools and technologies, courseware and IT education with the development of professor modules over the coming months. The company intends to develop knowledge, promote innovation and train skillful IT professionals to ensure a pipeline of innovative talent.

“The IBM University Program is aimed at meeting the needs that arise from the rapidly changing and complex world of information technology,” said James Rutledge, IBM Vice President, Latin America Global Delivery and Costa Rica Site. “Our mission is to work jointly with faculties to improve and increase the competitive IT workforce in Costa Rica in line with our goal to develop new skills for the twenty-first century and a Smarter Planet.”

New x86 Solutions Optimized for Smarter Computing Workloads

Helps Reduce Complexity, Manage Costs, Maximize Client IT Investments

IBM (NYSE:IBM) today announced powerful new server solutions aimed at helping x86 clients accelerate the journey to Smarter Computing. Designed to support the requirements of fast-growing businesses, the new products give data center managers the speed, performance and flexibility they need to implement and manage new and existing workloads.

The new products round out one of the industry's most comprehensive portfolios of x86 offerings. This lineup includes an energy-efficient blade server with breakthrough networking flexibility and a compact, affordable rack system that fills the price and performance gap between traditional two-processor servers and four-processor systems for handling high-performance computing and database-intensive applications. IBM also announced several new entry systems for small-to-mid-size infrastructure workloads.

Roland Hagan, vice president and business line executive, IBM System x business said, "Unlike many of our competitors, IBM offers clients a range of solutions from economical infrastructure, to performance optimized solutions, to expert integrated systems to help any size enterprise address its top business challenges."

IBM's newest blade server is the IBM BladeCenter HS23E, an affordable, energy-efficient platform for small to mid-sized organizations, offering breakthrough networking flexibility with built-in support for multiple networking technologies. With up to eight networking ports of Ethernet and other advanced networking protocols, the HS23E can deliver up to 42 percent better compute performance that previous generation servers. In addition, a free IBM FastSetup download automates server setup to reduce hands-on server deployments from days to minutes.

IBM unveiled a new category rack server, the IBM System x3750, a streamlined, entry four-processor offering created for technical computing and other floating-point intensive workloads. The x3750 offers IBM exclusive eXFlash storage technology and innovative "pay-as-you-grow" compute capability to clients who are outgrowing their dual processor systems and need faster database performance, and the ability to manage huge data volumes to gain business insights in seconds rather than hours. IBM has engineered the System x3750 to provide up to 25% more memory performance than comparable systems.

IBM rounded out its new portfolio of entry-to-mid level x86 offerings with new value rack servers that include the storage-dense IBM System x3630 M4, designed for cloud and department-level virtualization, virtual storage, and database workloads, and the IBM System x3530 M4, a new cost-optimized, dense, dual-processor system that is ideal for financial applications, web services, retail point-of-sale, and network infrastructure workloads. These new rack servers extend the IBM portfolio to new customers by lowering the cost of entry for two-processor workloads.

IBM also announced the new IBM Flex System x220, an entry-level compute node that further expands the flexibility and choice of compute options for the recently announced IBM Pure Systems family of expert integrated systems. Performance of the IBM Flex System x220 is tuned for entry virtualization applications and infrastructure workloads such as office email and collaboration. Its advanced management capabilities offer clients real-time system and workload management capabilities out of the box on day one.

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Dell to Acquire Make Technologies, Further Expanding Capabilities

Dell today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Make Technologies, a leading global provider of application modernization software and services that reduce the cost, risk and time required to re-engineer applications.

Companies are modernizing their applications portfolios so they can reduce legacy infrastructure operating costs. These applications run most effectively on open, standardized platforms including the cloud. With the acquisition of Make Technologies, Clerity Solutions and existing Dell Services capabilities, Dell provides end-to-end solutions from hardware through application migration services.

Make Technologies’ unique approach to the automation of application and code migration has helped IT departments significantly reduce both volume of code and associated operational costs. The company differentiates in several ways:

• Provides customers with end-to-end application portfolio transformation solutions that modernize entire portfolios of legacy applications in less time and with higher precision
• Provides automated application and code migration tools to re-architect legacy application software and data to a more modern architecture
• Reduces cost of maintaining and managing legacy applications
• Drastically reduces the amount of custom code in legacy portfolios, while protecting the legacy information and business processes of the business functions it supports
• Increases business agility through a re-engineered application that better aligns with our customers’ current and future business processes


Make Technologies was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia. Make Technologies has developed unique intellectual property, including TLM Enterprise Suite®, its applications migration software suite. Dell looks forward to welcoming Make Technologies’ approximately 100 employees to the Dell Services team. Additional terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The transaction remains subject to customary conditions and is expected to close in the second quarter of Dell’s fiscal year.

Quotes
“The addition of Make Technologies and Clerity Solutions to Dell Services positions us to lead in the fast-growing applications modernization space,” said Steve Schuckenbrock, president, Dell Services. “We have the capabilities to help customers with all their modernization needs—from re-hosting and re-platforming to code re-engineering. These offerings will enable Dell to support the thousands of commercial and public sector customers looking to migrate business-critical applications to open, standards-based architectures, including the cloud.”

“We continue to build and acquire the intellectual property necessary to execute on our strategy, and enable our customers to more simply and quickly deploy solutions that meet their needs,” said Dave Johnson, senior vice president, Dell Corporate Strategy. “By implementing the technologies acquired in Clerity Solutions and Make Technologies, Dell can help customers consolidate their legacy application on industry standard infrastructure. This will simplify their operational environments, lower their infrastructure costs, and enable them to leverage the cloud.”

"The combination of Make Technologies and Dell provides the market with a single vendor solution for any modernization activity and is an exciting step in expanding growth opportunities for our core application modernization software and services," said Bill Bergen, president and CEO Make Technologies, Inc. "Together, with Dell's global reach, scale and reputation for customer support, Make's methodology and tools will become even more accessible to more customers struggling with the dilemma that surrounds legacy environments."

About Make Technologies

Make Technologies is a leading global provider of legacy modernization software and services. Founded in 1999, Make Technologies has guided organizations that maintain portfolios of legacy applications to transform and implement business-agile systems. By using our proven methodology and tools, our clients maximize their IT investments to support their customers’ demand for results, reduce costs, and increase productivity. The Make Technologies brand is a trusted name in enterprise legacy modernization, including relationships with Oracle and IBM.

About Dell

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services that give them the power to do more. Dell Services develops and delivers a comprehensive suite of services and solutions in applications, business process, consulting, infrastructure and support to help customers succeed.