IBM has taken on a near £20 million six-year contract to manage the IT and shared hosting services interests of JVC Kenwoood Holdings Inc, the Japanese manufacturer of car and consumer electronics.
The companies have said cloud computing will be used to create a shared and virtual infrastructure to be hosted out of IBM’s data centre in Makuhari, Chiba, Japan.
As part of the deal IBM will also relocate JVC Kenwood’s existing data centres to its earthquake-proof Makuhari Data Center, which has its own fully redundant electrical system.
In neighbouring China, IBM cloud technology is being used to speed product development among ISVs, by developing a platform for software makers to sell their products hosted as Web-based services.
It is part of a multi-million IT infrastructure investment being made in Wuxi iPark, which has been targeted by the Chinese government as a future centre of software development in China.
The Wuxi iPark expects to see the emergence of five to eight ISVs, and hundreds of mid-sized to small ISVs.
The cloud service was built as a software service outsourcing research project from IBM code-named ‘Pangoo’, which integrates technology and concepts from cloud computing, software-as-a-service and software engineering as a service.
ISVs located in Wuxi iPark can use it to conduct project incubation, development and testing, and be charged according to usage.
Wuxi City of China was one of the first agencies to take advantage of IBM’s cloud computing capabilities.
Over the past 18 months or so, IBM has also provided cloud computing services to clients such as Sogeti, the Local Professional Services Division of Cap Gemini, and Vietnamese government institutions and universities. The company built its first cloud computing centre in Europe in March.
