Thursday 29 July 2010
Information technology and consulting multinational IBM Wednesday unveiled a global entrepreneur initiative to provide start-up companies industry-specific cloud-computing technologies.
‘The initiative will provide start-ups free access to cloud-computing technology to capture emerging business opportunities in fast-growing industries such as energy and utilities, health care, telecom and government,’ IBM Venture Capital group managing director Claudin Fan Munce told reporters here.
Next-generation entrepreneurs will also have access to IBM’s research community, sales, marketing and technical skills under the new programme.
Explaining why the company was opening its resources to start-ups, Munce said businesses the world over were applying new technologies to address industry-specific needs and start-ups were looking for new ways to capitalise on the new trend.
‘We invest over $6 billion per year in research, with about 3,000 people in eight labs across the world. With 4,914 new patents in 2009, we bring innovative technologies to market,’ Munce said.
With its smarter planet strategy and years of investments in research, IBM is skilled in building product and services offerings for businesses based on new ideas. Its industry frameworks are software platforms targeted to industry specific market opportunities such as smarter water, smarter buildings and smarter health care.
Norwest Venture Partners managing partner Pramod Haque said venture capital investments in the technology industry would be targeted at entrepreneurs in India, China, Israel, Britain, Germany, France and the US this year.
‘To make these investments count, start-ups must have the right skills to bring new technologies to market quickly. Venture capitalists, businesses, government and academia must collaborate to ensure entrepreneurs are prepared to succeed,’ Indian-born Haque said.
IBM will collaborate with 19 global industry and technology associations to identify and connect local start-ups to the programme through its smart-camps and forums at its innovation centres.
The criteria for start-ups to participate in the initiative are the company must be privately-held; in business less than three years and developing software aligned to IBM’s smarter planet focus areas.
HP, Intel Corporation and Yahoo! Inc. announced today the creation of a global, multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education. The goal of the initiative is to promote open collaboration among industry, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing. The HP, Intel and Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed will provide a globally distributed, Internet-scale testing environment designed to encourage research on the software, data center management and hardware issues associated with cloud computing at a larger scale than ever before. The initiative will also support research of cloud applications and services.
HP, Intel and Yahoo! have partnered with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany to form the research initiative. The partnership with Illinois also includes the National Science Foundation. Intel is a leading provider of platform technologies, including processors, chipsets, networking and SSD (solid state drives), for cloud computing data centers. Current platform features such as Data Center Management Interface (DCMI), Node Manager (NM) and virtualization have been designed to improve the manageability and energy efficiency of data centers. IDA will also leverage the test bed and its industry partnerships to train local students and professionals on the technologies and programs associated with cloud computing.
The signing ceremony was witnessed by Science, Technology and Innovation Minister Datuk Dr Maximus Ongkili, they said in a joint statement here Tuesday. They said Mimos joined Open Cirus as a test bed site to help advance cloud computing research and education. It would develop a national cloud computing platform to deploy services throughout Malaysia, focusing on enabling services through software, security frameworks and mobile interactivity, as well as testing new cloud tools and methodologies. Launched in July 2008, the Open Cirrus initiative is aimed at promoting open collaboration among industries, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, internet-scale computing.
Malaysia has made major strides in advancing ICT development in the country with the establishment of MSC Malaysia and the Ministry of Science, Technology and innovation. Cloud computing is the next step. With a headstart in our involvement in cloud computing research, Malaysia will be able to reap the benefits as an early adopter. Besides Malaysia, Open Cirrus has test bed sites in United States, Singapore, Germany, United Kingdom, Russia and South Korea. The test bed stimulates a real-life, global, internet-scale environment and gives researchers an unprecedented ability to test applications and measure the performance of infrastructure and services built to run on large-scale cloud systems.
A global, multiple data center, open-source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research, Open Cirrus was started last summer by HP, Intel Corp. and Yahoo! Inc. The goal is to “promote open collaboration among industry, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing,” the founders say. The Open Cirrus initiative spread across more borders this week with the addition of the Russian Academy of Sciences, South Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, and the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation in Malaysia (MIMOS).
Noting that IDC predicts that cloud computing will become a $42 billion market by 2012, rival IBM announced its own Blue Cloud initiative earlier this year and in April opened its first cloud computing laboratory in Hong Kong. IBM is also ramping up its PaaS offerings. Prior to announcing the three newest members at last week’s Open Cirrus Summit in Palo Alto, Calif., the founders had already attracted researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, and the Infocomm Development Authority, Singapore. HP also has developed Cloud Assure to help make any moves to cloud models mission critical in nature.
