IBM opens customer solutions lab in Bangalore

BANGALORE: IT major IBM today announced the setting up of its seventh global High Performance On-Demand Solutions (HiPODS) Lab here.

The focus of the lab is to solve customer issues such as simplifying IT management, helping companies scale their IT infrastructure, improving maintenance automation and optimizing resource utilization.

IBM has six other HiPODS centers across the world in the US, UK, China, Japan, and Switzerland.

“HIPODS has already shown leadership in areas like performance and capacity management, network delivered solutions AND Web 2.0 technologies,” said Willy Chiu, VP, HiPODS, IBM.

Some of the customer engagements in the HiPODS arena include Charles Scwab, New York Stock Exchange, Whirlpool and EBay. In India, the team has been working with enterprise customers like Bharti, HCL Technologies and Toyota Kirloskar.

Harish Grama, VP, IBM India Software Lab, said that the HiPODS team in India consists of a core team of 15 members at present. The IBM India Software lab consisting of 2100 engineers have had over 500 customer engagements last year. Part of this team would work at the HiPODS lab,” he said.

Chiu said that HiPODS constituted a “virtual global resource” for the company, which would take up a customer requirement and put a proof-of-concept in place. He added that the Indian team would not be restricted to just local customers but also global clients.

“The lab is essentially a gateway for Indian companies to tap into the know-how of IBM's software products, services and research labs and simplify complex IT implementations,” Chiu said.