IBM Announces Smart Analytics and Transactional Systems to Draw Key Insights from Vast Amounts of Data

Builds on IBM's strong momentum of delivering broadest range of industry unique analytic systems for emerging workloads

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Apr 07, 2010, 01:00 ET

ARMONK, N.Y., April 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new systems highly-tuned and optimized to help clients more quickly draw insights from vast amounts of data to anticipate emerging business trends, capture new opportunities and avoid risks. These new optimized systems support all environments in a data center, enabling clients to handle higher volumes of transactions and analyze data where it resides.

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As part of today's news, IBM is announcing IBM pureScale Application System with POWER7 technology and Smart Analytics Systems for x86 and mainframe environments. Each is integrated at every level -- from microprocessors to hardware and software, highly-tuned for analyzing enormous amounts of data and in real-time handling data intensive transactions.

Analyzing data where it resides in the data center is very important as clients seek to shorten the cycle time between processing and results, and want to avoid the costs of migrating data from one system to another. Wall Street firms, for example, are paying hefty rental fees to exchanges to allow their hardware to be located next to the servers that house market and trading data, mainly to shave critical milliseconds from the time it takes them to order and execute a trade.

With IBM's new analytics systems, clients can now more effectively manage analytics and transactional workloads and extract data insight up to twenty times faster compared to competitive piece parts, for improved business outcomes. These systems can also reduce storage space for structured and unstructured data by up to eighty percent with deep compression capabilities that shrink the data on disk, translating into significant energy-related cost savings for clients.

As the capabilities of digital devices soar and prices plummet, sensors and gadgets are digitizing vast amounts of information that was previously unavailable. According to recent analyst reports, enterprise data growth over the next five years is estimated at 650 percent. Eighty percent of this data will be unstructured generated from a variety of sources such as blogs, web content, email, etc. In fact, seventy percent of this unstructured data is stale after ninety days.

With this ongoing shift in the market, companies and governments need to be able to analyze and extract intelligence from information, irrespective of where data resides, in real time -- without being bound by a particular system or platform.

These new systems announced today are tailored to meet these very complicated needs that companies are facing and this level of integration offered by IBM from multiprocessors, through middleware to business consulting is bringing a new level of optimization and efficiency, while also driving down costs. For example, today's stock exchanges need to easily conduct tens of thousands of stock trades per second, completing each in microseconds, with extreme accuracy. These exchanges must have the ability to handle unanticipated trading volumes due to economic ripples such as the reporting of a company's financial performance or changing of government policies.

"Clients are demanding a new level of integrated systems that can handle a growing demand of data-intensive workloads while reducing IT costs," said Arvind Krishna, general manager of IBM Information Management. "These new offerings deliver the integration and optimization to more efficiently manage analytic and transactional workloads, freeing clients to invest time and resources in growing the business."

IBM pureScale Application System with POWER7 technology

The new IBM pureScale Application System combines POWER7-based servers with WebSphere Application Server and DB2 pureScale software to handle heavy transactional workloads, such as smart utility grids. As the amount of data continues to grow, organizations in all industry segments are poised to take advantage of IBM's economical and efficient approach to scaling capacity -- without forcing clients to overspend on excess hardware and software.

For utility companies, a smart electrical grid requires up-to-the-minute data to deliver electricity in real-time, where it is needed most. It helps customers monitor their energy consumption to avoid or reduce usage during the most expensive peak times. To handle the volume of data and transactions generated by this workload, companies require an application system that ensures continuous availability and virtually unlimited computing power required to meet changing business demands.

IBM Smart Analytics System 9600 with System z, and model 5600 with System x

The new IBM Smart Analytics System 9600 with System z, and model 5600 with System x, join the Power Systems based 7600 with attractively-priced integrated server, storage, software and services. These analytics workload optimized systems include pre-tuned components to speed deployment of powerful business analytics solutions in days. Integrated Cognos and InfoSphere Warehouse software capabilities include reporting, analysis and dashboarding; ability to analyze multiple business variables to uncover unseen relationships; and ability to mine both structured data and unstructured information such as email, websites and blogs, to uncover hidden opportunities or provide customer behavioral analysis.

Clients Rely on IBM Workload-Optimized Systems

"Many banks are trying to drive long-term savings and sustained growth and are looking to new technologies to accomplish this. By optimizing IT resources, banks can reduce complexity while improving performance to handle the increased number of transactions. We see IBM's optimized system addressing this to help ensure banks stay on that path of growth," said Ricardo Palma, general manager of Synopsis, an IBM Business Partner based in Latin America.

Synopsis recently worked with Banco de Credito del Peru to migrate its banking application, Credipago over to IBM optimized systems in matter of days. The banking system now running on IBM DB2 database software on Power Systems is handling new levels of transaction workloads with 30 percent more efficiently, while extracting new insight on clients to identify trends in customer services.

"For our month end processes, we are generating easily as much as 125,000 mortgage loan statements per hour," said Brent Steiner, IT Director of Celink, a reverse mortgage company based in Lansing, Michigan. "It is incredibly critical for our business to provide our clients with 24/7 online support. The reliance of our business upon the IT infrastructure and electronically stored data makes the potential cost of downtime enormous for us. The high resiliency that this integrated system from IBM makes it easier for companies to manage their growing IT ecosystem without interrupting the business."

South African Cement Company Makes Greener Products with Help from IBM

AfriSam plays an active role in building the core infrastructure -- roads and harbors -- of South Africa. In fact, they are the first company in the world to launch a green cement product called eco cement helping to reduce the carbon footprint. Recently, they moved from Oracle Database running on HP Servers to an integrated and optimized DB2 on IBM Power System in one weekend. The new DB2 systems reduced required storage space by approximately 35 percent, translating into significant cost savings by not having to buy unnecessary excess hardware.

"My number one priority is to continue to grow my business and deliver products that make a difference -- not to worry about the technology and hidden costs," Dev Govender, CIO at AfriSam. "We see IBM's workload optimized systems eliminating the concern of IT and allowing companies to shift their focus more on how they can transform their business through information."

IBM's leadership in workload optimized systems spans more than four decades. IBM has made significant investments in microelectronics R&D, software integration expertise and has the experience of deploying these systems to solve industry specific problems.

The IBM Smart Analytics System 5600 (with System x) is immediately available. The IBM Smart Analytics System 9600 (with System z) and the IBM pureScale Application System will be available later this quarter.

For more information on IBM workload optimized systems, please visit ibm.com/systems/smarter/news/