IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it plans to open a center of excellence in New York City to help financial services firms adopt open-source virtualization technologies. The KVM Center of Excellence in New York is the second such center established by IBM in the past five months. The first was opened in December in Beijing. The center will help clients, software engineers and business partners to quickly leverage open-source virtualization to build cloud-computing platforms.
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is virtualization software designed for Linux and Windows. Virtualization is used for server and desktop consolidation and cloud computing. KVM is an alternative to proprietary virtualization software and can help companies realize significant cost savings and avoid vendor lock-in. According to data from 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.(1) KVM is growing at 150% year over year in terms of unit shipments, with over 100,000 servers already using it worldwide for virtualization.(2)
“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 IBM KVM Center of Excellence will offer technical training and hands-on experience building enterprise KVM solutions. Resources will also be available to help line-of-business professionals understand the benefits KVM offers. KVM-based solutions from IBM, Red Hat, SUSE and other IBM Business Partners will also be showcased at the Center.
The KVM Center of Excellence is part of the IBM Wall Street Center of Excellence, which focuses on low latency and high performance technologies for financial markets clients. For more information or to arrange a visit, please contact the IBM Wall Street Center of Excellence.
IBM has announced that its cloud services and software will be based on the open cloud architecture. Without industry-wide open standards for cloud computing — such as OpenStack and KVM — businesses will not be able to fully take advantage of the opportunities brought on by interconnected data, such as mobile computing and business analytics.
