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A suite of new offerings that simplify the way in which customers can acquire capabilities to support their business transformation are being unveiled today at a major industry analyst event hosted by IBM.

They include:

The IBM TotalStorage Virtualization family of products is designed to help customers reduce the complexity and management of data in a network. Virtualization provides a single, consolidated point of management, boosting utilization and improving productivity of IT resources. The new products are intended to make it more cost-effective and easier for businesses to run and administer storage environments which house critical customer and financial information.

IBM Server Allocation for WebSphere Application Server which applies grid computing capabilities to help companies manage business applications, which run on different servers and have different usage patterns, as a single environment able to adapt automatically to sudden change. Developed by IBM Software, Systems Group and Research, the IBM Server Allocation for Wepshere Application Server will become available to WebSphere customers later this quarter and will feature IBM Tivoli's systems management capabilities in the second half of 2003.

IBM Web Server Provisioning based on IBM's autonomic computing strategy allows customers to switch or add servers to adjust capacity immediately, streamlining IT operations, optimizing resources, and lowering management costs. The solution automatically configures all the necessary software and hardware resources in a given environment, provisioning a server and balancing the load in minutes. Customers can switch or add a Blade Center server to increase capacity immediately, streamlining IT operations, optimizing resources, and lowering management costs. The solution, available in the third quarter, automatically configures hardware and software - such as HTTP or Web application servers - in a given environment, provisioning the server resources based on utilization.

New Financial and Delivery Offerings

Open Infrastructure Offering, allows customers to save money and better adapt their IT environments to changing business requirements. A new delivery option which lets customers acquire all or part of their infrastructure requirements for a single monthly price, allowing them to substitute new technologies as needed.

Standby Capacity On Demand offerings for blade servers and storage systems. IBM plans to offer customers later this year a configured blade offering where the customer would pay upfront for some of the blades, with the ability to turn on and purchase additional blades over a six-month period. These new proposed offerings will help build on IBM's popular "pay as you grow" strategy.

The new offerings include capabilities in three interrelated areas: integration, virtualization and automation.

Integration – creates business flexibility, by integrating disparate, unconnected business and IT processes allowing the collaboration of people, processes and information.

Virtualization– improves asset utilization because it allows you to treat resources as a single pool, accessing and managing resources by effect rather than physical location. Virtualization turns isolated islands of resources into valuable data and increased capacity.

Automation –increases business responsiveness. Automation allows your systems to sense and respond to the various peaks and conditions it encounters, dynamically, and automatically shifting resources as required. Automation allows users to get the right resources, when they need it, and where they need it.

These offerings are based on open standards supporting customers' diverse computing environments and protecting their investment in existing systems, applications and skills.

"Today our customers are overwhelmed by technology that is too complex and inefficient. With today's announcements, we make the IT infrastructure more integrated and automated, and we hide much of its complexity from the people who need to use it," said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, general manager e-business on demand. "As a result businesses can achieve far greater productivity from their technology infrastructure, and the money they save can be invested in innovation for the future."