IBM's PureSystems to lower IT cost

Technology giant International Business Machines has come out with an integrated system that, it claims, would help companies reduce time and money spent on managing information technology systems.

With this, it'll take competition from the likes of Oracle, Cisco, HP and Dell head-on in providing converged systems.

It says it invested $2 billion in research and development, acquisitions spread over three years, and put in millions of development hours across 37 laboratories in 17 countries.

PureSystems, the new family of stacks, aims at reducing complexity at the data centre.

With FlexiPure and FlexiApplications, the two systems that have been launched, IBM is bundling servers, storage, network, software and applications in one box that would not only be ready for deployment within hours, but have built-in expertise garnered over the years and also be cloud-ready.

The aim is to simplify the technology environment for companies and make them invest both time and money in innovation.

According to the 2012 IBM Data Centre study, one in every five organisations can allocate more than half their IT budgets for innovation.

"Almost two-thirds of IT budgets are today spent on doing nothing, but keeping the light on. More important, the procurement cycle that CIOs and companies need to manage is anywhere between six and nine months.

This, in turn, delays project," said Alok Ohire, director, Systems and Technology Group, IBM India/South Asia.

A survey by Forrester on behalf of IBM suggests 23 per cent of new IT projects (worldwide) are deployed late.

IBM said the launch was one of the biggest from the company, as it could change the way IT was being procured and deployed.

According to Barbara Cain, vice-president at IBM's software group, since the system has codified best practices, new application deployment is faster by as much as 20-30

times.

"The time of provisioning also reduces from 45 days to a few minutes," she claimed.

In India, IBM has already managed to sign on a client for its new family. It did not disclose the name but said it was a mid-market company.

"We have signed a couple of proof-of-concepts with companies in India. They include one of the large banks," said Ohire.

IBM also claimed it was different from what other suppliers -- Cisco, HP, Oracle, Dell -- were offering.

"I think the biggest difference between what we have launched today and what others are offering is that 'they are talking and we have delivered.

"This is not just the hardware and software coming together. It is a step ahead of that," said Pradeep Nair, director, software group, IBM India/South Asia.

Oracle has a line of products that offer clients hardware and software packages. Cisco is doing the same with its Unified Computing Systems and virtual computing environment.

HP has similar offerings.

Helena Armitage, general manager at IBM's systems & technology group is quick to clarify IBMs positioning.

"What Cisco and HP are doing are attacking a piece of this big problem. We have learnt so much from our experience by managing client data centres across the world and that is represented in the PureSystem family. More important, it is interoperable."

The systems can be loaded with IBM Power or Intel x86 chips and run third-party software as well as IBM's own.

Armitage added: "In a managed services environment where there are 30 Unix servers, 22 storage devices and 200 x86 servers and if we consolidate this into one PureFlex, the company will save $2.6 million on operations and almost $2 million savings on management time over three years."

IBM already has 100 partners ready to work on these new systems. These are available in three versions -- express, standard, and enterprise. Express starts with $100,000.