IBM has announced an $8 million investment in a new cloud center in Cerdanyola del Vallés, Barcelona. It is the first cloud center in Spain and the 26th from IBM in the world. IBM's new center is located in the same facility as the “la Caixa” data processing center. From this center, IBM will provide its cloud services to clients worldwide.
The opening ceremony today will be attended by Felip Puig, Councillor for Enterprise and Employment of the Generalitat of Catalunya, the regional governing body of Catalonia, Marta Martínez, Country General Manager, IBM Spain, Portugal, Greece and Israel, and Juan María Nin, CaixaBank vice-president and CEO.
This opening of this new center confirms IBM strong commitment to cloud technology. IBM has said it is on track to generate about $7 billion revenue by 2015 from cloud computing of which $3 billion is net new.
The new cloud will offer a wide range of infrastructure services and cloud platforms. Cloud solutions from this center will be tailored to the business needs of both large companies and public entities and small and medium enterprises.
“The opening of this cloud center in Spain is another step in our company's strong commitment to this technology,” explains Marta Martínez, the general manager of IBM Spain, Portugal, Greece and Israel. “This will surely help us drive innovation in companies and institutions of all sizes. We are proud of the fact that we can provide technological services from Barcelona to clients from any part of the world. This puts our technology experts and professionals at the worldwide vanguard and proves that our country can successfully compete in an increasingly global market.”
“The collaboration with IBM allows us to obtain the highest performance from this data center, which is equipped with the latest technologies,” explains CaixaBank vice-president and CEO, Juan María Nin. “This infrastructure, with a 6,000 square meters technical room, is a key for the growth of CaixaBank activities, and it will even become more important in the future, given the importance of innovation in the financial sector and the emergence of new businesses based in data analytics. The excellent management work carried out by IBM is a cornerstone for CaixaBank’s innovation leadership strategy.”
A pioneering project of the Generalitat de Cataluña
Generalitat of Cataluña has decided –in a pioneering initiative in Spain- to consolidate one of its four data centers at the new cloud center. The government will move to cloud the applications that manage Health, Well-being and Family local government management.
With this project, the Generalitat of Cataluña expects to obtain important savings in its technological investment and a greater efficiency that will enable it to offer better utilization of resources for other public institutions. As a result, the Generalitat will make the cloud center available for local governments and universities. The contract, with a term of 10 years and an estimated value of €140 million, was signed during the fourth quarter of 2012.
Synergies with the data processing center of “la Caixa”
IBM is already managing a data center for "la Caixa" at the same location. La Caixa owns the building. Clients of the new cloud center will benefit from the synergies already generated there with “la Caixa,” which has been an IBM strategic partner for the last 50 years.
The technological infrastructure of "la Caixa’s" data processing center has received an Innovation Award in 2013 by the British publication “The Banker,” which is part of the "Green Technology" category, due to the plant efficiency’s high level and the low electronic consumption, which has resulted in a 41% energy savings.
IBM and cloud computing
IBM has been one of the pioneering companies in developing a solid commitment with cloud services, which turns into a base of more than 4,000 companies that are clients of the IBM, more than one million managed virtual computers and more than 200 million cloud transactions that are processed everyday. In line with this strong commitment with cloud technology, IBM announced last July that it had completed the acquisition of Softlayer, the world's largest provider of cloud computing infrastructure.
Apart from the solutions offered in this center, IBM portfolio also includes “software as a service” (SaaS) cloud solutions, an option that help companies reduce costs and simplify its implementation.
