Winning In Europe And Oklahoma

IBM announced a couple of nice wins these past few days.

One, a partnership agreement between IBM and Itella, a leading provider of business services in Europe and Russia.

It’s a seven-year cloud computing agreement to help Itella streamline its business operations and improve its flexibility and time-to-market, and allowing them to focus on their core business and develop new services for their clients.

Itella provides postal, logistics and financial transaction process services in Northern and Central Europe, as well as Russia.

Specifically, IBM will build a private cloud to provide hosting as well as application management and development services to Itella. With the cloud, IBM will automate basic production of technology services as well as improve the quality and management of those services.

“Through this operating model renewal, we can adopt a flexible service delivery to increase automation and introduce best practices, utilizing IBM’s world-class competence,” said Jukka Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Itella Mail Communications. “Through the partnership, we can make our operations more efficient and cut costs, without compromising our high-quality service.”

And nearly halfway around the globe and just north of here, the great state of Oklahoma is partnering with IBM to save $15 million over the next five years and to help improve services to state residents there.

As governments institute structural changes in the way agencies measure performance and deliver services, data analytics and new delivery models can help lead the way for transformations that realize a measurable return on investment and improved quality of life.

By analyzing business processes and consolidating IT projects, IBM will help the state gain significant savings in software licensing and technology maintenance costs— resulting in an expected IT budget recovery of 30 percent.

“At a time when we all have to learn to do more with less money, IBM has been instrumental in identifying and prioritizing IT consolidation projects for the state of Oklahoma, at the same time allowing us to invest in new services for our residents,” said Alex Pettit, chief information officer, state of Oklahoma.

“IBM brought not only its extensive public sector services experience to help create the initial business case for this project, but also worked with participating agencies to verify that the new technology environment would improve mainframe service and reduce costs.”

IBM helped the state to understand the challenges of providing IT services to various agencies with diverse requirements for data management and federal reporting.

The new IT infrastructure established a model for IT compliance with federal guidelines on program data and processes, using an IBM System z mainframe. IBM also helped the state meet project funding requirements—bridging the financial gap between the initiation of the project and the cost savings.

The agreement helps ensure that the delivery of technology services is more effective and more consistent. In addition, the new infrastructure gives each agency more control over the quality, performance, and support of their technology environment.

Ultimately, the consolidation of five mainframe platforms also yielded significant savings in costs and lower lease costs. The recommended options projected an 18-30 month payback period that would save 25–30 percent of the state’s combined annual IT budget.

IBM worked with the state on a detailed analysis of the IT infrastructure and opportunities to consolidate computing capacity, storage, network, backup and disaster recovery capabilities.

The plan included development of a target architecture, establishment of a high-level roadmap, and development of a services delivery schedule between the Office of Management and Enterprise Services (OMES), responsible for operating the consolidated environments, and each state agency.  

You can learn more about other of IBM’s smarter government initiatives here, and about IBM’s cloud computing offerings the likes of which it’s building for Itella here.

Building A Bigger, Better Cloud In Ohio

The cloud, she is getting bigger, particularly in the great State of Ohio.

For Ohio has selected IBM for a $267-million 10 year modernization of the State of Ohio Computing Center (SOCC) through the development of a private cloud computing environment and the use of other hardware, software and services from IBM.

The SOCC includes four floors and more than 350,000 square feet of space, and houses infrastructure for several state agencies that support more than 1,400 applications executing on over 2,700 servers.

By working with IBM, the State will be able to focus on meeting application demands that underpin the services it provides to the citizens of Ohio.

The program will also lay the groundwork for future opportunities including the State’s drive toward private, secure cloud computing.

Highlights of the work with IBM include:

• Remediating power and cooling capabilities in the State’s facility in Columbus
• Migrating agency related infrastructure and application workloads within the facility
• Implementing operating model improvements to deploy ITIL-based service management
• Ongoing services in a co-managed arrangement with State staff

“We are working with IBM to significantly reduce the complexity of our infrastructure, improve data center operations and increase service delivery for state agencies and the constituents they serve,” Stu Davis, State of Ohio’s Chief Information Officer said. “This is a foundational component of Ohio’s IT Optimization efforts that will result in savings and culminate in the consolidation of the state’s IT assets into a primary state data center. This provides agencies with services they require and ensures we are spending taxpayers’ dollars once.”

The State’s cloud computing environment will be designed to provide a secure, high-performance and dependable foundation for computing, while costing the State less than its current infrastructure.

The goal of the State’s IT consolidation is to substantially reduce IT infrastructure services spend, and reallocate those funds to applications and services that support the citizens and businesses of Ohio.

You can learn more about IBM Smarter Government solutions here.

Government Insight

Remember from my blogging coverage of IBM’s Information on Demand event in Vegas a couple of weeks ago IBM Global Business Services exec Frank Kern let the cat out of the bag about a couple of new business analytics centers that IBM would be opening?

One in London, centering on the financial industry.  The other in Washington, D.C., centering on the public sector.

Well, welcome to Washington.

On Tuesday, IBM officially announced the sixth in its network of analytics solution centers, this one dedicated to helping federal agencies and other public sector organizations extract actionable insights from their data.

Actionable insight out of Washington, D.C.?  Get the popcorn ready! (along with your filibuster rally hats!)

In all business analytics seriousness, the new IBM Analytics Solution Center in Washington, D.C., will draw on the expertise of more than 400 IBM professionals to apply breakthrough streaming technologies, mathematical algorithms, and modeling.

Using these tools, IBM will help clients optimize individual business decisions, processes and even entire business models, as well as manage risk and fraud and, ultimately, improve the delivery of public services.

The new center will be located in IBM’s Institute for Electronic Government at 1301 K Street, N.W., and will serve as the hub for collaboration with federal agencies, academia, and other institutions in the Washington Metro Area.

Expected analytics projects will range from transportation and social services to defense logistics and homeland security systems.

By way of example, among the analytics projects already underway with government agencies, IBM is working with the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) to modernize the planning, programming, budgeting and execution functions within the command.

USSOCOM is the combatant command within the Department of Defense that provides fully capable special operations forces to defend the U.S. and its interests. The command also plans and synchronizes operations against terrorist networks.

The project consists of the design, development and integration of a Special Operations Resource Business Information System, which speeds access to information for the command.

Another project: IBM, the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) and MedVirginia developed a first-of-a-kind electronic records exchange system to shave the amount of time to receive medical records from weeks to minutes.

IBM also worked with SSA to build a predictive model using text analytics to help identify initial disability applications that are likely quick allowances and helped reduce the amount of time for a favorable initial disability determination on these applications from months to weeks.

The Washington-based IBM Analytics Solution Center, which specializes in the work of the public sector, is part of IBM’s business strategy to expand its business analytics and optimization capabilities and services globally.

IBM has opened five other analytics solution centers – in New York, Dallas, Berlin, Beijing and Tokyo — and expects to retrain or hire as many as 4,000 new analytics consultants and professionals globally as part of these centers.