IBM Pre-Engineered Technology Services

IBM Corp. introduced advances to its services portfolio that streamline the way it designs, deploys and manages a clients’ information technology infrastructure. IBM’s next-generation IT outsourcing services deliver a standardized approach that can reduce the time it takes to transition a client’s IT environment by more than 60 percent and potentially reduce management costs by up to 50 percent.

Central to IBM’s new services capabilities is a new set of engineered assets that integrate process, software, industry expertise and IBM Research know-how to create reusable service components that act as the underpinnings for IBM’s outsourcing services business. For example, rather than spend weeks or months building a standalone server configuration IBM will apply pre-configured server builds that will get a client’s environment running in days, compared to months. IBM has developed similar assets in the areas of service-desk and storage services. These new assets are constructed based on IBM’s experience managing the IT environments for more than 1,000 clients in over 400 data centers in 170 countries, and will continue to evolve leveraging shared global insights. As a result, clients will be able to achieve faster time to return on investment and improved flexibility, while freeing up time and resources to focus on innovative projects.

"IBM has more experience running IT systems than any company in the world," said Erich Clementi, senior vice president, IBM Global Technology Services. "Since the first outsourcing engagement decades ago, IT service providers have approached each client’s unique environment with a blank piece of paper. That was an inefficient model wasting both time and money. By infusing our industry-leading expertise, software capabilities, experience and best practices into our service offerings in a standardized, systematic method we can speed up the time it takes to do something very complex in a very reliable way. This frees up time for IBM and our clients to collaborate more on innovative solutions to business challenges and exploring new possibilities."

This advance in outsourcing services by IBM comes as clients are faced with radically shifting demands on IT to drive business value because of the velocity of change and acceleration of global expansion.  Clients today are looking beyond cost cutting to how they can leverage IT into their businesses to stimulate growth, meet clients’ needs and prepare for the future, according to analyst reports. IBM’s standardized approach tightly integrates a client’s business processes with IBM’s services assets to incorporate new technologies, such as cloud computing.

IBM first began testing the standardized offerings on its internal systems. By deploying its entire storage infrastructure using the standardized asset-based approach, IBM estimates it will lower its storage costs by nearly 50 percent.  

Separately, IBM and BNSF Railway Company (BNSF) have teamed up to bring technical innovation and business solutions to reduce costs and support future initiatives. Through storage optimization and server virtualization, IBM can help BNSF save millions of dollars over the length of the agreement, which will be applied to innovations that support BNSF’s business.

"IBM’s solution enables BNSF to better manage our IT costs, allowing us the opportunity to collaborate in new areas such as cloud computing, analytics, legacy system migration and application management," said Jo-ann Olsovsky, vice president and chief information officer, BNSF. "IBM’s solution not only brings us significant cost savings, but also a foundation that promotes continuous innovation."

IBM’s pre-configured server, storage, service desk and network assets have the capabilities to not only reduce implementation time and management costs, they also leverage years of shared global learnings, IBM Research patented processes and analytics capabilities to:  

• Discover new value by virtualizing servers beyond the typical 20 percent of light workloads that are virtualized today, such as print, file or web
• Eliminate storage complexity with a single set of integrated tools that supports more than 150 different devices from multiple vendors, and can scale to support evolving needs
• Modernize a client’s service-desk environment and improve helpdesk caller response times via a 24x7x365 global support service in 50+ languages that maximizes customer satisfaction and workplace productivity
• Create a unified communications network for global businesses in a matter of weeks, and using analytics-based client portals, analyze data for better business decisions