IBM today announced global availability for its cloud service on five continents—plus a new center opening in Spain—based on its sourcing business to host SAP applications and other core operations. 

Many organizations are eager to leverage the economic advantages of cloud computing to run their critical applications on the cloud. To address this, IBM developed an Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud. Called IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+ (SCE+), the service combines high service level agreements, security and reliability with elasticity and subscription-based pricing.

This service offers the same level of assurance normally associated with a hosted service to make sure clients can always access their core applications for ERP, CRM, analytics, social business and mobile computing from the cloud. With this cloud service, IBM also helps manage patch updates and identity management, improving security, which analysts often cite as an inhibitor to cloud adoption.

"This is a logical evolution of IBM's sourcing business that gives us an advantage both in our services relationships and the cloud market as we define a new enterprise-grade cloud today," said Jim Comfort , general manager of IBM SmartCloud Services.

IBM is also announcing today that IBM SmartCloud for SAP Applications, an enterprise service unique to IBM, is available globally.

IBM SmartCloud for SAP Applications automates and standardizes provisioning of IT environments, and can accelerate service delivery with expert certified staff. The SmartCloud services for SAP applications delivers 99.7 percent availability based on a global delivery model to support cloud-based systems around the clock. This service is available for SAP Business Suite software and the SAP BusinessObjects solution portfolio as an enterprise-class, fully managed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering for running SAP solutions in a production environment.

In addition, IBM is marrying its Global Business Services expertise, tools and processes with SmartCloud for SAP applications to deliver LifeCycle as a Service. This can transform implementations of SAP applications end to end – from sandbox to production. 

Clients may set up their SAP solutions development and test operations on IBM's public cloud service – SmartCloud Enterprise. Then those SAP applications can be transitioned to the SCE+ platform for production to further assure higher availability of the operations.

IBM has clients in finance, manufacturing, telecommunications, electronics, government and healthcare using SCE+. For example, IBM SCE+ is the cloud platform powering the Philips Smart TV platform for Internet services, which delivers greater interactive services to millions of TV viewers in more than 30 countries in Europe, as well as Brazil and Argentina.

Heathcare is also well suited for SCE+. Summit Health, a health care management company, is tapping IBM SCE+ to support the company's growth plans around health care management and proactive wellness programs. The Generalitat de Cataluna, a regional government in Spain, is planning on using SCE+ in a new IBM cloud datacenter in Spain to improve its healthcare system and share resources among its universities and town halls.

Details on SmartCloud Enterprise+

SCE+ is offered from IBM's cloud centers in Japan, Brazil, Canada, France, Australia, the U.S. and Germany, giving clients broad geographic choice of where their data resides. IBM announced today the opening of its first cloud center in Spain, located in Barcelona, to service clients worldwide, which will be operative by mid-2013.

The SCE+ environment can have service levels that guarantee availability for each single OS-instance from 98.5 percent up to 99.9 percent.

New also is IBM Migration Services for SmartCloud Enterprise+, which helps clients migrate to cloud more quickly and cost effectively by determining which workloads are best suited to the SmartCloud Enterprise+ environment. Standardized and automation-assisted, IBM Migration Services aim to deliver ROI in six to 18 months.