IBM Opens Latin America's First Specialized, High Performance Software and Services Lab in Brazil; New Lab Links Clients across Latin America with IBM's Advanced Technology and Business Expertise from around the World

IBM announced today the opening of a multi-million
dollar, high performance software and services laboratory in Sao
Paulo, Brazil.
The first of its kind on the continent, the High Performance On
Demand Solutions Lab (HiPODS) is designed to support the growth of
business across the emerging markets of Latin America by finding
answers to the most vexing business and technology questions. The
Brazil lab joins a global grid of six specialized IBM facilities to
deliver a growing range of software lab services, including the
recently opened HiPODS labs in China and India, as well as Japan, the
UK and the United States.
The lab provides businesses access to servers, storage, and more
importantly, high-value skills from IBM's top talent in Brazil and
around the world, depending on the specific needs of the client. The
IBM teams build custom solutions to drive automation, virtualization
and standards into clients' business and IT infrastructures.
"We are bringing IBM's deepest software and consulting
capabilities into the heart of our fast-growing client base in Brazil
and to the accelerating economies across Latin America," said Steve
Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software, in
attendance to open the lab. "This lab will help local clients by
providing a network of worldwide high-value solutions to transform
their businesses."
Additionally, IBM's six HiPODS labs act as a gateway for clients
to tap into the know-how of tens of thousands of IBMers and Business
Partners at hundreds of software, services and research labs around
the world. The lab brings IBM's deep business insights, technology
know-how and vast experience of simplifying complex IT implementations
to clients.

Global Innovation Grid: Harnessing the Power of the Globally
Integrated IBM

The HiPODS lab is connected using a Global Innovation Grid. The
grid allows IBM to create a project team in minutes, assign servers
and storage for a project in less than an hour, dynamically provision
software components, connect global talent pool teams through blogs
and wikis and most importantly reuse assets developed for one client
with hundreds of other global clients anywhere in the world.
This Global Innovation Grid creates a faster path to innovation
for customers as it allows them to focus on implementing new
technologies rather than worrying about the infrastructure challenges
of major IT projects.
By design, lab collaboration extends and validates new
technologies in real world usage, while customers gain access to
proven innovations. For example, the HiPODS lab has developed a
Web-based service for evaluating the performance of workloads based on
Service Oriented Architecture, or SOA, for common scenarios such as
banking, travel booking and insurance claims handling. This HiPODS
developed service is available in IBM's SOA Business Catalog, a
single, comprehensive online directory of hundreds of reusable SOA
assets from IBM and business partners. Providing the ability to take
people-based processes and turn them into more flexible, reusable
software components made possible by SOA becomes critical.

Building "Smarts" Into IT and Business Infrastructures

Customers can bring their applications to this dynamic
infrastructure lab to validate their performance, scalability and
solutions needs before deploying them in a business environment. The
specialists at the HiPODS lab also work with customers to tune their
software to facilitate optimal performance and to develop customized
solutions. With a strong double-digit year-to-year revenue growth, IBM
Brazil will have no shortage of customers to serve.
"With significant growth in the overall economy comes the need for
sophisticated IT capabilities that can scale up to sustain rapidly
expanding and shifting workloads," said Willy Chiu, vice president,
High Performance On Demand Solutions at IBM. "Through automation and
virtualization, IBM HiPODS can help clients extend their IT
performance by wringing the most out of their infrastructure, a
critical foundation for growth. This new lab is essentially a gateway
for Latin American clients to access the intellectual capital,
business insight and real world experience of IBM's hundreds of
software, services and research labs around the world."
"IBM's new Brazil HiPODS lab is a very encouraging development for
Latin American technology and business overall," said Tarquinio Teles,
CEO of Brazilian online game developer Hoplon Infotainment SA. "At
Hoplon, we are going through a transformation right now from a
regional independent game company to a global provider of environments
for Massive Multi-Player Online Gaming. This means we have a two-fold
challenge: for our TaikoDom sci-fi/space game to adapt to a diverse,
global audience, and now for our own environment infrastructure to
meet global scaling demands. On both counts, we will need the kind of
specialized SOA insight and high performance testing that the IBM lab
can provide."

HiPODS Labs Around the World

IBM's six HiPODS Labs are located in Brazil (Sao Paolo), China
(Beijing); India (Bangalore), Japan (Yamato); the UK (Hursley) and the
United States (San Jose, CA). These labs are responsible for
facilitating billions of transactions every day from the company's
many high volume customer engagements. IBM is responsible for creating
and managing some of the world's most complex Internet infrastructures
for leading global companies.
The opening of this laboratory demonstrates IBM's long-standing
commitment to deliver innovative solutions in the region. In 2005, IBM
moved its Latin American headquarters from Miami to Sao Paulo. IBM
Brazil, established in 1917, was IBM's first operation outside the
U.S.
For more information on IBM, please visit www.ibm.com.