VietNamNet Bridge – IBM on September 24 announced the establishment of a cloud computing centre in Vietnam and three others in South Korea, India and Brazil, raising the total number to 13 worldwide.

The signing ceremony between IBM and the first client of the Cloud Computing Centre, the Vietnam Technology and Communication JS Company.

The centre will give enterprises such as universities, mid-market and government bodies in Vietnam immediate access to the resources they need to pilot cloud infrastructure and applications, and deliver new and innovative services to their customers.

IBM expects that with these new centres and other centres in the US, China, Ireland, Japan, Holland and South America, plus five New Enterprises Data Centres, it will have the largest cloud computing customer network.

“We believe that cloud computing will bring to the government a new IT investment model, improving the connection between business activities and IT infrastructure, contributing to the country’s development,” said Vo Tan Long, Deputy General Director of IBM Vietnam.

Also on September 24, IBM announced the first client of its cloud computing centre in HCM City, the Vietnam Technology and Communication JS Company.

In late 2007, a portal serving creative exchange based on cloud computing infrastructure was built in Vietnam, by IBM and the Ministry of Science and Technology.

IBM Cloud Computing Centers host computing activities for clients or provide access to expertise and infrastructures for clients to design and deploy their own cloud environments. This computing model allows businesses and consumers alike remote access to a vast computing resource that can be tapped on-demand to deliver next-generation services that consumers demand, like online medical records or mobile stock portfolio management. It is also energy efficiency because of it being shared infrastructure, and allows organisations to better track information, pay for what they use and access more computing, storage, services or applications on demand.

IBM has dedicated more than 200 full time researchers and over 100 million dollars over three years to cloud computing, and offers a number of products and services to help clients offer the types of services end users and consumers demand. Built following IBM’s expertise in leading massive-scale computing initiatives, Blue Cloud is a set of hardware, software and services that allows IBM clients to offer personal and business services from remote, centralised servers, the ’cloud,’ that share computing resources and bandwidth.

(Source: VietNamNet, thestandard, VNE)