Made in IBM Labs: IBM to Build First Cloud Computing Center in China

WUXI, CHINA and ARMONK, NY, Feb 01 (MARKET WIRE) --
IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it will establish the first Cloud Computing
Center
for software companies in China, which will be situated at the new Wuxi Tai Hu
New
Town Science and Education Industrial Park in Wuxi, China.

The center will offer emerging Chinese software companies the ability to tap
into a virtual computing environment to support their development activities. It
will
be established through an agreement signed today between IBM and Wuxi Tai Lake
Industry Investment and Development Company Limited.

IBM will work with Wuxi Tai Lake Industry Investment and Development Company
Limited;
the Wuxi municipal government; and its business partners to build the China
Cloud
Computing Center, which will be a shared facility providing each software
company
in the park with its own virtualized computing resource. For example, a company
will
be able to use the allocated resource for designing, developing and testing
its software products. Such virtual environments can replace the traditional
data
centermodel, in which each company owns and manages its own hardware and
software.

Companies in the park will be able to access these common services
providedby the center at any time -- just as they use utilities and other shared
services. The technologies being offered to the community include IBM
Rational software development tools, WebSphere Application Server software and
DB2
database software running on IBM System x, System p and BladeCenter servers. IBM
Tivoli systems management software will manage the cloud computing environment.

"Being one of the model zones to offer outsourcing services in China, the
city of Wuxi is committed to providing companies in our park with the
environment and tools that are needed for rapid growth," said Mr. Zhu
Weiping, Party Secretary of Bin Hu District, Wuxi Municipal Government. "We are
proud
to be the first in the world to offer the power of cloud computing to companies
in Wuxi Tai Hu New Town Science and Education Industrial Park."

Wuxi is classified as an investment zone by the Chinese government and has
been named a "National Model City of Science and Technology Advancement" for
five
consecutive years.

"Cloud computing is helping to foster the growth of new software companies
in
China," said Steve Mills, Senior Vice President and Group Executive, IBM
Software Group. "Like many new software companies seeking growth opportunities
both locally and abroad, these Chinese software companies will rely on technical
infrastructures built on open standards and delivered as a service. This open
approach to computing will help them deliver innovation and pursue global
market opportunities."

The Wuxi Tai Hu New Town Science and Education Industrial Park will be
hometo dozens of new software companies and represents a multimillion dollar
investment. iSoftStone, one of the new software companies in the park, plans to
develop account settlement software for the financial services industry.

"The China Cloud Computing Center represents a milestone in service-oriented
computing," said T. W. Liu, the chairman and CEO of iSoftStone. "It will
allow companies in the Wuxi Software Park to leapfrog to the newest computing
models and will provide an efficient IT platform for software development."

Cloud computing is an approach to shared information technology (IT)
infrastructure in which large pools of systems are linked together to
provide IT services. Cloud computing allows corporate data centers to
operate more like the Internet by enabling computing resources to be
accessed and shared as virtual resources in a secure and scalable manner. The
center will be built using IBM's "Blue Cloud" technologies, a series of
cloud computing offerings based on open standards and open source software which
link together computers to deliver Web 2.0 capabilities such as mashups,
open collaboration, social networking and mobile commerce.

IBM has established a significant research and development presence in
China. There are currently more than 3,200 IBM engineers and scientists
employed by
IBM labs in Beijing and Shanghai. Engineers from the High Performance on
Demand Solutions (HiPODS) team in IBM China will work with their colleagues in
the IBM Silicon Valley Laboratory to establish the center.

For more information about IBM's High Performance On Demand Solutions Lab,
please visit here

Media Contact:

Mark Guan
IBM Media Relations
1-914-766-1658
markguan@us.ibm.com

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