Cognos, an IBM company and the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced that IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence software is now available, for the first time, for Linux on System z.

With IBM Cognos 8 BI for Linux on System z, customers can efficiently report and analyze transactional systems directly on the mainframe, so workers across an organization can use information to quickly identify and respond to critical business trends. Highly targeted information delivery and analysis capabilities let knowledge workers, ranging from front-line managers to executives, receive strategic business information where, when and how they need it to make better business decisions.

A result of IBM's rapid assimilation of its acquisition of Cognos, the product unites the proven reporting and analysis capabilities of IBM Cognos 8 BI with the power and reliability of IBM System z. This allows organizations across industries to leverage their mainframe investments to improve decision-making and overall business performance.

The availability of IBM Cognos 8 BI for Linux on System z extends IBM's Information on Demand business strategy, which unifies the company's software, hardware, consulting and research expertise to help customers gain access to the right information when they need it, along with business insights to address and respond to changing market demands. Further in support of this strategy, IBM has established multiple worldwide System z competency centers to help customers learn about IBM Cognos 8 BI on System z, benchmark the System z architecture and interact with other IBM products and solutions.

The combination of IBM Cognos 8 BI and System z demonstrates the mainframe's resurgence as the strategic platform of choice for running modern applications. It provides organizations, such as Satyam Computer Services Ltd, with the means to transform their disparate pieces of data into consistent, actionable business information on a modern mainframe that has been designed from the ground up to help dramatically increase data center efficiency. The IBM System z mainframe significantly improves data center performance and reduces power, cooling costs, and floor space requirements with unmatched levels of security and automated management and tracking of IT resources.

'Our BI Center of Excellence evaluated the tool for very large volumes of data. With IBM Cognos 8 BI for Linux on System z customers can gain a single, current and consolidated view of business information to support operational processes and disperse to the right teams across the company for more effective-decision making,' said Indira Munjuluri, Head of BI Architecture & CoE group , Satyam Computer Services Ltd. 'Aligning such a broad range of BI capabilities with our infrastructure strategy helps us deliver consistent business solutions through a powerful, ultra-efficient data center.'

More than 600 new applications and solutions were introduced for the IBM mainframe in 2007 ' bringing the total to more than 4,000 unique applications available on the System z platform. 'System z customers want more users across their organization making better, faster decisions using their infrastructure platform of choice,' said Leah MacMillan, vice-president, BI Product Marketing, Cognos, an IBM Company. 'With IBM Cognos 8 BI for Linux on System z, these customers will be able to take advantage of the broad range of proven BI capabilities for all types of users across the organization to optimize operational processes while reducing infrastructure cost and complexity.'

Cognos, an IBM Company, is a recognized leader in delivering BI and performance management solutions across industries. For example, 19 of the top 20 consumer goods companies worldwide, 9 of the top 10 insurance companies and over 1,000 financial services organizations, including 9 of the top 10 banks in Europe and all of the top 10 banks in the United States, use IBM Cognos solutions.

IBM announced the availability of the System z10 Enterprise Class on February 26, 2008 as the most sophisticated server ever developed, reflecting a multi-billion dollar investment, five years of development and a global team of thousands of technical professionals.

IBM System z is an important part of IBM's new enterprise data center model, which helps clients improve IT efficiency and facilitates the rapid deployment of new IT services for future business growth. The model is based on best practices for virtualization, green IT, service management and cloud computing.

About IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Products:

IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI) delivers easy-to-use BI with the right context, through familiar interfaces, at the right time. For further information visit: http://www.cognos.com/products/cognos8businessintelligence/index.html. For more information on System z, visit http://www.ibm.com/systems/z.  

About Cognos, an IBM company:

Cognos, an IBM company, is the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions. It provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance. Cognos was acquired by IBM in January 2008. For more information, visit http://www.ibm.com/software/data/ and http://www.cognos.com. 

Cognos and the Cognos logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cognos ULC, an IBM Company, in the United States and/or other countries. IBM and the IBM logo are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, or other countries, or both. All other names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Note to Editors: Copies of previous Cognos press releases and product information are available on Cognos' Web site at http://www.cognos.com.  

As expected, a new supercomputer built by IBM for Los Alamos National Lab topped the latest list of the world's 500 fastest computers. Other IBM machines were the second and third faster, and IBM computers accounted for more than 40 percent of the entire list.

Built for the National Nuclear Security Administration, the New Mexico machine can perform more than a quadrillion calculations per second or 1.02 petaflops. It is powered by IBM PowerXCell 8i Cell Broadband Engine processors – derived from chips that power today’s most popular videogame consoles -- and 6,562 AMD Opteron Dual-Core processors.

The No.2 fastest computer in the world is an IBM Blue Gene/L system at NNSA's Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California, which clocked in at 478 teraflops Team Blue Gene also held the No.3 spot with a 450 teraflop performance from the Blue Gene/P system housed at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Lab in Chicago.

To browse the latest IBM jobs, please visit our job board.

Global business technologies provider IBM and SelfServiceWorld.com, leading news source covering the self-service industry, have announced a free webinar, "Serving the New Consumer Through Self-Service." 

$438 million was spent on self-service units in 2006 and IHL Consulting Group estimates that more than $230 billion will be spent this year. Other than simply providing the self-service option, new technologies can make it possible for consumers to conduct transactions in different ways, as well as offer products and services in multiple formats and across a number of different industry sectors.  

The webinar will take place on Wednesday, June 26, at 7 P.M. UTC (2 P.M. EDT).

The topics speakers Norma Wolcott of IBM and Christopher Fletcher of AMC Research will discuss include:  

• Emerging operational best practices to enhance the shopping experience  
• Current and future use of selling tools such as kiosks, digital signage, and mobile devices  
• Killer software applications that are driving investments  
• Cross-industry dynamics driving consumer expectations 
• Customer examples of successful implementations    

 

To sign up for the webinar, click here.

IT and business services firm Logica has named Jean-Marc Lazzari as the new chief executive of outsourcing services. The new CEO will also join Logica's executive committee. He will be based in Paris and run the company's global outsourcing services business.  

Before being appointed chief executive at Logica, Lazzari was vice-president and general manager of Unisys Continental Europe. His duties covered the company's entire portfolio for continental Europe.  

Prior to his role at Unisys, he was head of IBM's global human resources solutions business and vice-president of the company's business consulting services for the EMEA West region.  

In reference to Lazzari's appointment, Logica's CEO Andy Green said: 

"I'm delighted to welcome Jean-Marc to the Logica team. It's an exciting time for us as we execute the program for growth we set out in in April. Jean-Marc's personal drive and deep experience of the European outsourcing services market will be invaluable to us as we grow the newly established outsourcing services division, an imporant component of our strategy."   

Software giant IBM has expanded its Innovation Center in Bangalore, India, to offer technology, consulting and education support to IT professionals, software developers, start-up companies, independent software vendors and academics.

The new IBM centre will also help businesses develop new software applications and services as well as test their products before launching them on the market.

IBM has put more than $250 million in the initiative. The company has a total of 38 innovation centres across the globe.

IBM India exec Pradeep Nair said: “Our approach is to enable and engage the IT community in India in every possible manner to help them productize assets and build relevant open-standards based industry solutions for our clients. This new centre will ensure that the stakeholders in the ecosystem benefit from our sales, marketing and technical expertise to expand and grow into new global markets.”

Tech giant IBM said on Sunday that Hewlett-Packard's acquisition of consulting and outsourcing firm EDS last month is not likely to challenge IBM's leading position on the IT services market.

Rajesh Nambiar, vice-president of IBM India, said: "Hewlett-Packard has bought 'yesterday's business model'... it is unlikely to challenge our presence in the IT services space," adding that the combined revenue of the two companies was estimated at $36 bilion, which is far behind IBM's estimated $52 billion. 

"EDS have a huge labour force, but they are concentrated in high-cost jurisdictions and they really lack the global delivery capabilities that are expected of services, margins... or services businesses these days. So HP is going to have to devote an extensive amount of time and resources to improve this business model that is aged and out of date," Nambiar said.

Analysts believe that the move may propel Hewlett-Packard to the second spot in the technology services sector, which would in turn signify tougher competition with IBM. In instances where systems integration and management projects needed to be won, HP-EDS would have an advantage, according to analysts.  

Nambar added: "Though HP-EDS will try to cross-sell their products, they lack consulting skills. Clients today look for overall solutions and both the companies currently does not have (sic) any consulting capabilities. It is extremely difficult to integrate a services business into a core business like HP's. There's going to be cultural differences to overcome. There will be technical and channel differences that they'll have to overcome"  

 

 

Global technology and consulting giant IBM has launched an integrated approach to managing enterprise content with innovative new business software.

IBM's Business Content Services strategy helps companies across business sectors deal with the enormous growth of data and content, created independently or collaboratively in international workgroups. Clients and organizations can opt for a complete solution from IBM or for the ECM offerings that allow them to manage content created in a number of different applications: Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, IBM Lotus notes, etc.  

The strategy is part of IBM's Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software portfolio and combines IBM's ECM capabilities with a large number of collaboration options and social software.  

Lee Roberts, general manager of IBM Enterprise Content Management, said:

"IBM's commitment to delivering market-leading ECM infrastructure solutions allows workers to create content in familiar desktop applications and document collaboration tools, while enabling organizations to more efficiently and cost-effectively meet their content management and compliance goals. Our Business Content Services approach is focused on bridging the gap between the simple management of business documents and a comprehensive ECM infrastructure."  

To help clients develop a plan to effectively deploy the new ECM offerings and advance the ECM technologies in their organizations, IBM is offering design and consulting services. You can find more information on IBM's Business Content Services on IBM's website.  

 

 

The management consulting careers site Top-Consultant.com has a number of career events scheduled for the coming months.

If you are interested in attending open evenings with IBM or the Place Group, please make sure you fill out the registration forms on the Events page by the end of the month.

Open evenings provide job seekers with an excellent opportunity to check out a company and its employees before applying for a job there and they often help consultants decide on the next step in their career.

IBM hosts a Recruitment Open Evening for SAP Professionals on June 12th. The company is eager to meet seasoned SAP professionals who are interested in joining their Global Business Services Team.

The Place Group Open Evenings will be hosted in Birmingham, Manchester and London in May and June. The consultancy is currently recruiting Consultants, Project Managers and Client Directors across England to join their team of professionals who aim to deliver 21st century education to British schools and pave the way in the transformation of Children's Services.

To find out about other career events and how they may benefit your career, please visit Top-Consultant.

Information technology companies have been reporting a steady, healthy growth of revenue, but U.S.-based IT companies have had higher revenue growth than their Indian peers according to a new study by IT research and consulting firm Gartner.

In 2007, Indian IT companies' revenue grew 38 percent and U.S. firms' saw a 55.4 percent growth. Revenue from IT services totalled $748 billion globally last year, which is 10.5 percent more than in 2006.

The domestic IT services market in India chalked an 18 percent growth, which was a better result than the overall Asia-Pacific growth rate in the sector.

“While cost remains a key consideration in the outsourcing services market in India, operational efficiency and business agility is driving most IT services engagements,” says Gartner’s senior research analyst Arup Roy.

India-based IT services vendors performed well on the whole, chalking a 38 percent growth rate, but none of them were ranked in the top 25 IT service providers. India’s best ranked IT vendor is Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) at #28.

IBM remains the world’s market leader in IT services with 7.2 percent of the share and a growth rate of 12.2 percent. Accenture also reported a strong growth rate: 19.7 percent.

Kathryn Hale, vice-president of research at Gartner’s worldwide IT services group, said:

“This strong growth, combined with strong first quarter results for market leaders, runs counter to the gloomy and widespread economic concerns arising in the U.S. To build on their success in 2007, service providers should focus on selling services that will deliver visible returns in 2008, either in cost, speed to market, or business impact. Apart from that, they should also focus on growing sales in emerging markets that enjoy faster-growing economies and high growth rates.”

The Aberdeen Group, the leading research and market intelligence company in the technology sector, has released its Annual State of the Market Report.

This year, the report includes the list of the top 100 organizations – hardware, software and service providers – whose contribution to the business community has excelled in recent years.

The report also pinpoints the top criteria businesses use when choosing technology solutions: total cost of ownership (43%), product functionality (42%), vendor stability (24%), market specific knowledge and experience (24%), domain or industry expertise (22%) and reputation (21%).

Microsoft, Oracle and SAP took the leading spots on the list of the top technology vendors. They were followed by other prominent global technology providers like IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco and others.

The IT services sector is well represented in the Top 100 with technology companies like Accenture (#25), EDS (#36), Tata Consulting (#43), Infosys (#56) and Capgemini (#79).

The report is based on five years of research and a survey of 4,645 respondents. In 2008 alone, the Aberdeen Group will conduct more than 240 benchmark studies. 90 percent of the Fortune 500 and 75 percent of the Global 500 companies rely on the Group's research.

 

Here are the top 25 technology vendors for 2008:

 

1. Microsoft

2. Oracle

3. SAP

4. IBM

5. Cisco

6. Hewlett Packard

7. Dell

8. Salesforce.com

9. EMC

10. Sun Microsystems

11. Google

12. RIM (Blackberry)

13. Siemens

14. Adobe

15. AT&T

16. Apple

17. Sage

18. Infor

19. Nortel

20. Avaya

21. Red Hat

22. Motorola

23. Verizon Wireless

24. Dassault

25. Accenture

 

For the full list, go here.