IBM announced plans to open a center of excellence in New York City to help financial services firms adopt open-source virtualization technologies. The company’s new Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) Center of Excellence in New York is the second such center established by IBM in the past five months; it opened the first last December in Beijing. The center aims to help clients, software engineers and business partners to quickly leverage open-source virtualization to build cloud-computing platforms.
KVM is virtualization software designed for Linux and Windows that provides an alternative to proprietary software for server and desktop virtualization and cloud computing. According to data from International Data Corp. (IDC), the worldwide virtual-machine software market was on track to grow to over $3.6 billion in 2012, up from $3.0 billion the year before, a 19.3% year-over-year growth. By comparison, KVM is growing at 150% year over year in terms of unit shipments, with some 100,000 servers already using it worldwide for virtualization.
“Wall Street is at the forefront of the adoption of Linux, and financial clients are now leading the way on adopting KVM in order to build a flexible computing infrastructure to meet business demands,” said Jean Staten, director of cross-Linux strategy at IBM. “As the industry evolves to meet new demands from customers and regulators, these enterprises will need expertise on how to build open standards-based clouds.”
The new Center of Excellence will offer technical training and hands-on experience building enterprise KVM solutions. KVM-based solutions from IBM, Red Hat, SUSE and other IBM Business Partners will also be showcased at the Center.
CLO Inside Scoop: Bringing Wall Street companies into the cloud is fast becoming a requirement rather than a luxury. The industry is under growing regulatory pressure to make trading information more transparent for investors, while there is an ongoing need to deploy IT solutions that can support the sophisticated processes that are the lifeblood of investment banking firms.
Financial companies also are tasked with doing more with less – a classic business case for the cloud. While these companies are tech-savvy, they also are very focused on security and the need to protect mission-critical data. That’s what makes the KVM Excellence Center interesting: giving Wall Street a hands-on experience with a robust solution should spur faster adoption of (or migration to) an open-source cloud.
(For more information visit: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/virtualization/kvm/stories.html).
Recent Comments