IBM has launched a massive private cloud opening up more than a petabyte of data to its sales teams worldwide. A version for clients was also announced.
Blue Insight, as the environment is know internally, will open up client and market data gleaned from nearly 100 different information warehouses and data stores to 200,000 IBM sales people and developers worldwide.
“It will enable us to start to bring together some data and give more visibility of expertise. It allows us to bring things together in a way we were not able to do before,” says Michael Bradshaw, IBM vice president of application and infrastructure management optimisation.
Product development teams will be able to study sales information and industry trends from the cloud. Sales teams will gain a clearer perspective on customer relationships and regional trends. Overall, the aim is to pull together best practice from teams across the globe and make it available to help individuals make better decisions.
It’s all built using a combination of internal hardware and software, including a 48-processor IBM System Z10 mainframe and Cognos 8 Business Intelligence.
Blue Insight serves as a template for its customer cloud offering, IBM Smart Analytics Cloud. In its recent Global CIO study, 83% of respondents pinpointed business intelligence and analytics as key tools to meet client needs and gain competitive edge.
