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By Mel Duvall
IBM may have come late to the cloud computing party, but it appears to be making up for lost time. This week the computing giant made a number of announcements on the cloud computing front, including the opening of a cloud computing lab in Hong Kong to focus on collaboration services.
IBM said the Hong Kong Cloud Computing Laboratory has been launched to support the rapidly growing demand for its LotusLive cloud service. The company said the service has attracted more than 18 million client seats in its first year of operation, and it believes demand is just taking off.
The cloud computing market is expected to grow at a compounded annual rate of 28 percent between 2008 and 2012, growing from $47 billion to $126 billion, according to various industry sources. The Hong Kong lab will support the development of collaboration and communication services based on the LotusLive platform. LotusLive delivers collaboration and social networking services, including e-mail, instant messaging, file sharing, Web meetings and project management, starting at a cost of $3 per user per month.
IBM said the Hong Kong lab will operate as an extension of its China Development Laboratory, which has more than 5,000 developers. “Strategically located near emerging growth markets, we expect that the new laboratory and IBM’s LotusLive platform will play an important role in helping clients here and around the world to take advantage of the growth of Web 2.0 collaboration,” Matthew Wang, IBM’s VP of the China development lab, said in a statement. “IBM intends to increase its investment in the laboratory and recruit more talent to capture this huge global opportunity.”
In addition to the cloud computing lab, IBM also opened a new data center in South Korea on Thursday and said it will build another data center in Auckland, New Zealand to support its cloud computing efforts.
In another announcement, the company introduced an offering called Tivoli Live Monitoring Services, which provides data center monitoring services over the IBM cloud. IBM said the service is aimed at organizations who are looking for sophisticated data center monitoring capabilities, but without having to deploy the hardware and software, or hire the expertise required.
“With digital information as the lifeblood of more organizations, even the smallest companies or divisions consider the data center’s functionality mission-critical,” said IBM Tivoli general manager Al Zollar.
IBM said the service can help organizations identify and address potential problems, such as bottlenecks that may threaten application availability.
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