OSLO, Norway, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE:
IBM) today announced the opening of a new cloud data center in
Fetsund, 30 km outside Oslo,
Norway, the industry's first cloud data center in the
region. The IBM Cloud data center will support growing cloud
adoption in the Nordics.
Now customers throughout the region will have local access to a
complete portfolio of IBM cloud services for running mission
critical enterprise workloads, including IBM Bluemix, Watson and
analytics capabilities. EVRY, a leading Nordic IT services company,
is already leveraging these capabilities to accelerate its
transformation and deliver business value to its clients, which was
part of a strategic partnership announced last year. This includes
establishing a private cloud solution enabling their clients to
further drive innovation.
The facility in Norway is IBM's
48th global cloud data center and the 12th in
Europe. It is part of the
company's growing global data center network, enabling businesses,
from large enterprises to start-ups, to digitalize business and
operations, and drive innovation.
"We are committed to providing global and local clients the
fastest and easiest onramp to the IBM Cloud to accelerate their
digital transformation," said Robert
LeBlanc, senior vice president of IBM Cloud. "This
investment will provide Nordic customers, especially those in
regulated industries, with more flexibility to manage and gain
insight into data within the region."
Many clients in the Nordics, like Cxense, EVRY, KONE, Opera and
Sapa Group have already embraced IBM Cloud services. KONE, for
example, one of the world's leading manufacturers of elevators,
escalators, automatic doors and turnstiles, is working with IBM
Cloud to connect its global maintenance operations of more than one
million elevators, escalators and building doors to cloud-based
services. By gathering the vast amounts of data from equipment
operations and using sophisticated analysis and connectivity
running on IBM's global infrastructure, downtime can be minimized
and repairs carried out more quickly.
"We enable our partners and clients to keep their data securely
within the country, while being able to leverage existing IT
investments, which is a key differentiator for IBM," said
Arne Norheim, CEO of IBM Norway.
"Local access to IBM's global network of public cloud data centers
provides the ideal flexibility for our customers. The new cloud
data center is designed to fuel support for innovation and quick
adoption of new solutions that will help improve business
efficiency."
The IBM Cloud data center in Norway offers the full range of IBM Cloud
infrastructure services, including bare metal and virtual servers,
storage, security services, and networking. These services can be
deployed on demand with full remote access and control, allowing
customers to create their ideal public, private, or hybrid cloud
environments.
The facility connects to all IBM's public data centers on
the continent and around the world in order to help
customers transfer and replicate their data in multiple
locations. Customers can quickly balance or reroute workloads
between multiple locations.
The new cloud data center will also accelerate the commitment of
IBM to foster the growth of cognitive and artificial intelligence
technologies throughout the region. Developers will have access to
Bluemix - IBM's Cloud innovation platform – and more than 150 APIs
and services spanning key areas such as cognitive, Blockchain,
Internet of Things (IoT) and big data.
IBM Cloud is already being used by well-known clients and
partners in the Nordic region. Below is a summary of some marquee
customers and partners:
- Cxense: Headquartered in Norway, with offices around the world, Cxense
provides SaaS and best practices for audience insight and
personalization to drive user engagement and conversions to over
350 customers worldwide. To expand globally, Cxense turned to IBM
Cloud to implement a hybrid cloud solution that allowed them to
deploy services from IBM data center locations in the U.S.,
Europe and Japan. As a result, Cxense achieved 95 percent
faster deployment with provisioning reduced from three months to
less than a day, allowing the company to expand its global presence
and improve agility.
- Nordea: IBM has partnered with Nordea Bank to deliver IBM Bluemix as an
innovation platform for their start-up accelerator program. With a
focus on future banking innovations and technologies such as
Blockchain, cognitive computing and IoT, Bluemix gives the engaged
start-ups an ideal platform for rapidly evolving their ideas and
taking advantage of the growing Bluemix ecosystem of services and
API's.
- BigMed and Intromat: IBM has partnered with
leading Norwegian healthcare organizations to help them in the
development of potential solutions with the goal of improving care
for patients suffering from cancer and mental diseases. The BigMed
project will attempt to leverage big data and gene sequencing to
develop a solution that will provide information to doctors to help
them treat patients with cancer. The Intromat project will work to
develop digital solutions to provide doctors with information to
help in the treatment and follow up of patients suffering from
mental diseases. Both projects will leverage IBM Bluemix innovation
platform, and the projects have been selected and funded by The
Research Council of Norway.
- Service Providers: Sopra Steria AS and Atea
Outsourcing Services will extend and scale their production
environments using IBM Cloud for a flexible infrastructure,
OPEX-based consumption model as well as global reach. By using IBM
Cloud's global network of data centers, Service Providers can
provide local network speed almost anywhere in the world,
provisioned, managed and monitored from one single console.
- Sales Agents: Customers, Cloud Service Providers and
Business Partners can acquire IaaS from IBM via multiple channels.
Sales agents are trained and ready to support our customers with
IaaS from IBM. The clients have access to scalable and flexible
hybrid cloud solutions, offered on a pay-as-you-go model, which can
be seamlessly integrated with existing on-premise solutions. IBM
Cloud sales agents in Norway are:
Tech Data Azlan, Arrow ECS, Crayon, Atea and Cloudwalker.
About IBM Cloud
For more information about IBM Cloud visit:
www.ibm.com/cloud-computing
For more information contact:
Andre Fuochi
IBM
469-394-7274
afuochi@us.ibm.com
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SOURCE IBM