Deon Newman

Future business success will depend a great deal on the enterprise’s ability to deliver customer service excellence – securely, cost effectively and rapidly, says IBM.

Delivering on new customer demands will increasingly depend on the enterprise’s IT infrastructure – notably the mainframe – and its capabilities in the cloud, analytics and mobile space.

Leah Parks

Addressing the IBM zEnterprise Executive Forum staged in Johannesburg and Cape Town, IBM executives noted that mobile, social, analytics and cloud computing are reinventing the way in which enterprises engage with customers. The need for enterprises to address these priorities in an efficient and cost-effective way had informed IBM’s investment in developing the latest zEnterprise System innovations, which extend the mainframe platform to help large enterprises reshape the IT experience for their customers. zEnterprise also enables enterprises to drive intelligent insights, in near real time, to improve business performance and reduce risk.

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Maurice Blackwood" />Deon Newman, vice president of IBM System z Marketing, said forward-thinking enterprises were cognisant of the growing need to meet consumer demands in a secure, transparent way. With customer experience as the future measure of success, enterprises need to leverage advanced real time analytics, cloud computing, social media, mobility and security technologies to deliver on expectations.

Martin Dvorsky

Newman said zEnterprise was also designed to meet the growing need for high availability and ‘bulletproof’ security, all at a lower total cost of ownership.

Martin Dvorsky, Technical director of IBM’s worldwide System z Workload Team, said the latest generation zEnterprise solutions were the result of over $1 billion investment in R&D on the part of IBM. In addition to delivering significantly better, faster processing and enhanced capabilities, zEnterprise solutions were designed to allow enterprises to ‘right size’ systems in line with their requirements.

Andrew Mead

IBM also announced that its new zEnterprise BC12 (zBC12) mainframe is now available in SA, offering twice the capacity than its predecessor, at a price point starting at under R2 million.

Maurice Blackwood, IBM Systems & Technology group director for South Africa; says the new zBC12, running on Linux, is uniquely positioned to meet the growing needs of South African enterprises, to cost-effectively, securely and efficiently run their systems while also positioning themselves to take advantage of new technologies.

The Linux-only based version of the zBC12, the Enterprise Linux Server (ELS) is designed to help clients who are rapidly growing their businesses, especially in growth markets. The ELS includes hardware, a z/VM Hypervisor and three years of maintenance. The system can run a portfolio of over 3,000 Linux applications, and clients can extend it with two new solutions, ELS for analytics and Cloud-Ready for Linux on System z, as an onramp for analytics and cloud computing.

Development of the zEnterprise suite is continuing, and IBM has hinted at a series of new announcements in the coming months.