IBM Gets PureSystems Into the Market

Since April 2012, more than 2,300 PureFlex systems have shipped to more than 77 nations, with strong adoption in global growth markets. With PureSystems, IBM has completely integrated all the technology components—virtualized servers, storage, networking and cloud management software—needed for a customer to turn on a secure private cloud system within minutes. IBM’s Business Partner ecosystem for PureSystems is expanding, with more than 1,000 resellers worldwide authorized to sell the systems. IBM officials said an asset of PureSystems is its roots in built-in expertise, which they call “patterns”—blueprints that accelerate software deployment and automate ongoing management and maintenance, enabling IT departments to overcome skills gaps and lessen the drag on resources. IBM works with 275 ISVs to offer more than 345 software patterns across 21 industries.

Based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, DynaFront Systems selected PureSystems to develop and launch a new cloud-based service. DynaFront will be able to help its insurance clients reach new markets and offer more affordable, tailored and comprehensive insurance policies to customers. The PureSystems infrastructure is expected to support more than 4 million insurance users in the first year of deployment.

ValeCard, a Brazilian company, replaced its existing Oracle infrastructure with PureSystems to streamline its data center operations and recordkeeping. ValeCard needed a robust infrastructure to manage thousands of transaction records from contracts with large companies and government entities. BlockAuto, a ValeCard subsidiary, will use the new PureSystems to locate and track vehicles. 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.

PCCW Solutions, an IT services provider in Hong Kong, uses PureSystems as the foundation of its new Enterprise Solutions Superstore, an online environment for ISVs to offer highly flexible applications to customers in the cloud. PCCW Solutions offers enterprise customers a full spectrum of cloud computing services, supporting large enterprises with cloud services tailored to their needs as well as small and midsized enterprises with public cloud services.

Lite Bite Foods is a food retail entity in India, with quick service restaurants like Subway and Rapps, casual dining restaurants such as Asia7 and Punjab Grill, to PVR food courts and express outlets like Fresc Co and Baker’s Street. The company selected PureSystems over Hewlett-Packard and Dell to provide the backbone for a complex and geographically dispersed environment. The system reduced Lite Bite’s costs and complexity while cutting down the application deployment time. In just a few months, the company saw an 80 percent improvement in the company’s productivity.

Australian fruit and vegetable retailer Harris Farm Markets selected an IBM FlexSystem solution to help support its business growth and reduce IT costs and complexity. The solution significantly boosted the performance of its critical systems, including its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to bolster company efforts to offer customers the freshest quality produce through its 23 stores across New South Wales.

Tonkin Consulting, an Australian engineering, environmental and spatial consulting practice, replaced its HP switching hardware and servers with PureSystems. The solution has enabled Tonkin to quickly create and deploy a private cloud providing disaster recovery for its offices in South Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory.

Travelport, a business services provider to the travel industry, is running PureSystems as the backbone of a system for its mission-critical databases and applications. The elasticity of the system will allow it to quickly scale to meet fluctuating client demands during high-travel periods.

Sogeti, a professional technology services vendor and subsidiary of Cap Gemini, used PureSystems to consolidate five IT sites in France into a single high-availability facility in Paris. Sogeti is running a minimum of 800 virtual machines in high availability, a 60 percent increase—all while using the same level of operations staff.

Cellum Group is using PureSystems to offer shoppers in Hungary an enhanced mobile payment service. Cellum handles more than a million mobile payment transactions per month and is seeing significant growth in the number of customers using its services. Cellum offers mobile payment solutions for any type of mobile phone and a large portfolio of user applications available.

China’s Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology (XAUAT) is installing a new smarter computing solution based on PureSystems. XAUAT will use PureSystems to improve education services for students and launch the university’s Digital Campus platform and student Campus Card. Founded in 1895, XAUAT has about 40,000 students from across West China and around the world. Educational and administrative functions are conducted in both Chinese and English to reinforce the university’s aspiration for “leap-forward development.”

Thane Bharat Sahakari Bank replaced its HP environment to create an intelligent infrastructure built on PureSystems. The infrastructure will help the bank manage growth, introduce new client services and boost profitability. The bank, which wants to expand beyond the more than 20 current branches, needed to refresh its hardware infrastructure. PureSystems will give the bank open, scalable systems that increase utilization and reduce the number of servers in the data center, enabling it to consolidate its IT operations even as it grows its business model. Increased utilization means a smaller footprint, lower energy costs and reduced systems management costs.

Peter Baker Transport (PBT) selected PureSystems to simplify and streamline its server, storage and disaster recovery needs. PBT, which offers nationwide freight service, provides logistics, transport, courier and bulk freight movement services, as well as storage and distribution solutions across New Zealand. PBT officials needed to enhance their IT infrastructure through efficient server consolidation and storage enhancement, and wanted to strengthen their disaster recovery system. The PureSystems solution was selected over such bidders as HP, EMC and Dell.

Dombivli Nagari Sahakari (DNS) Bank, the first bank to launch mobile banking services in India, selected PureSystems over HP and Dell to deliver highly available and disaster-tolerant financial services. The new system integrates the bank’s hardware, cloud capabilities, network management and virtualization, allowing it to expand its reach, gain new clients and reduce operational expenses by 10 percent, without increasing its IT infrastructure footprint. DNS Bank is already benefitting from the simplicity and control IBM PureFlex provides and has reduced power consumption by 10 percent.

PureSystems is helping the Dmitry Rogachev Russian Federal Scientific Clinical Center of Pediatric Hematology, Oncology and Immunology to improve patient care and draw insight from its clinical data. The new system enables the hospital to better manage a broad spectrum of medical data, including medical files, documents and images.

The University of Information Technology in Ho Chi Minh City is using PureSystems to build a cloud platform that will host the university’s virtual campus. New training courses, online applications and other services will be developed and tested in this cloud environment. In addition, PureSystems will support selected scientific projects across the fields of IT systems, computer science, computer engineering, software engineering, and network communications.

Azersun Holding, a producer and exporter in Azerbaijan’s food industry, is leveraging PureFlex Systems and Storwize V7000 storage to process and store more than 188 terabytes of data. The solution was selected over HP, Cisco and EMC alternatives. Azersun Holding, which has a nationwide network of manufacturing facilities, also boasts a large network of overseas supply and distribution offices. The company wanted to link its ERP and sales management systems to enable retailers and partners to work with the same information at the same time, but needed to be able to process its growing volumes of digital information faster—and to do so while reducing power consumption within the same IT footprint.

To help mobile broadband carriers meet the short, intense spikes in network traffic demand associated with large events like music festivals and sporting events, IBM and Connectem are testing a new mobile network capacity solution built on PureSystems. The solution integrates PureSystems with cloud-based mobile packet core software from Connectem. As a result, customers will experience lower network latency even during periods of peak network activity. Mobile providers, such as Australia’s Optus, have already begun testing the technology with plans to eventually deploy it as part of their cloud networks.

IBM is partnering with oil and gas companies to implement solutions and new approaches built on PureSystems to improve production efficiency and recovery rates. Sichuan Geophysical Company of Petroleum Administration Bureau (SCGC), the largest oil and gas seismic exploration and engineering service provider in China, is using a PureSystems solution that will enable it to analyze seven times more seismic data than before. As a result, SCGC can now be more precise in locating remote resources and avoid “dry hole” drilling. A data analysis cycle that had taken 27 days to complete now takes about a week. In addition, new capabilities can help increase the use of existing gas and oil fields; even a modest 1.5 percent increase in recovery from existing wells would yield enough oil for half a year’s global consumption.

The Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Reno, Nevada, is using PureSystems to serve as a basis for new public-private sector collaboration that will drive overall workforce and economic development across the state and support the governor’s economic development efforts. From climate modeling to real-time water-quality monitoring and airborne-infection forecasting, PureSystems will not only change the way data is managed and examined, it will also offer a shift in the higher education business model.

The city of Bunbury, one of the largest regional local governments in Western Australia, selected IBM’s PureSystems to streamline its IT infrastructure and provide a cloud-ready environment to deliver future initiatives such as private cloud computing for local government agencies.