IBM PureSystems Helps ValeCard Meet Demands of Business Expansion

First Brazilian PureSystems client seeking gains in performance, security and scalability

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Jul 16, 2012, 01:00 ET

UBERLANDIA, Brazil, July 16, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) and ValeCard today announced the first PureSystems project in Brazil. ValeCard – a GRUPO CEPHAS company spanning several industry sectors including finance, agriculture, real estate and healthcare – will use the new PureFlex system to streamline its datacenter operations and record keeping.

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Facing rapid expansion of its business - with growth above 40 percent annually over the past three years - ValeCard needed a robust infrastructure to manage thousands of transaction records from contracts with large companies and government entities. Additionally, ValeCard needed to meet an ever increasing set of new regulations and standards for data availability.(1)

For example, BlockAuto (one of ValeCard's subsidiaries), will utilize the new PureSystems solution to locate and track vehicles. It receives updated geographic locations of all vehicles in its database every 30 seconds, and processes the data to an online portal for their clients use. Another subsidiary, DentalShow, will use the systems to process the queries of customers to hundreds of dental clinics. Additionally, ValeCard will be able to authorize transactions and monitor commercial supply throughout its network of more than 60,000 merchants and 3 million users. The security and scalability of PureSystems is critical for these operations, which must comply with the standards and technical certifications of various government agencies.

"A great advantage of ValeCard is to serve its clients with customized projects. To keep this feature in the environment of high growth company, we maintain our capabilities beyond our current technology needs," said Jose Geraldo Ortigosa, ValeCard Operations Manager. "IBM PureSystems gives us freedom to grow, increase our availability, allow the creation of a hot environment for Disaster Recovery and puts the company in the right direction by using new technologies such as Cloud Computing."

ValeCard anticipates that the project will generate gains in performance, enhanced data protection, a significant increase in system scalability and provide a complete integration of the new environment with legacy data. This is critical to simplifying the administration and management issues that have resulted from the frequent acquisitions that the organization has made.

ValeCard will also benefit from the functionality of the IBM SmartCloud that is provided by PureSystems. IBM SmartCloud computing helps clients to reduce operating costs and speeds development time and delivery of new environments for the user.

PureSystems, introduced in April, is the result of $2 billion in research, development and acquisitions over four years and has been designed to help change the economics of IT, to help organizations reduce IT costs and complexity and put more resources towards innovation and growth. With PureSystems, IBM has taken the unprecedented step of completely integrating all of the technology components – virtualized servers, storage, networking and cloud management software – needed to enable a customer to turn on a private cloud system within minutes. In addition, the highly scalable PureSystems cloud is delivered with built-in security and no single point of failure.

For more information on IBM PureSystems visit: www.ibm.com/press/pure

About IBM Brazil

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(1) The solution includes the IBM Flex System Enterprise, IBM Flex System Manager, four compute nodes x240, a POWER module p260, two IBM Storwize V7000 systems, a TS3200 tape, four IBM B24 switches and a PureFlex System 42U rack, using SmartCloud Software for the creation of a private Cloud and iTSM for backup.

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