IBM Opens IT Deployments Lab in India

IBM Corp. has opened a new lab in Bangalore, India, where it will work with customers on advanced IT deployments that involve high levels of scale and performance, the company announced Thursday.

The lab is one of seven so-called High Performance on Demand Solutions Labs that IBM has set up worldwide to work on “first of a kind” deployments with customers, Willy Chiu, a vice president with IBM’s software group, told reporters in Bangalore.

Past work by the labs has included building a high-performance business grid for portfolio analysis for Charles Schwab & Co. Inc. The seven labs are working with about 100 customers altogether.

Working with customers in this way helps IBM generate expertise and intellectual property that can be used by some of its other businesses, including its product groups, Chiu said. Some of the deployments become references for other customers, he added.

The lab in Bangalore will have 15 staff and also draw on staff and resources from IBM India Software Lab (ISL), which has operations in Bangalore and three other locations in the country. With about 2,100 staff, ISL develops middleware and works with customers on architecting, designing, and deploying software, said Harish Grama, vice president of ISL.

IBM already runs about 20 labs, application services centers and research centers in India. The company had 38,500 staff in India at the end of last year, of which a large chunk works in IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) services for customers worldwide.

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-John Ribeiro, IDG News Service