Panasonic has ushered in the cloud computing era by adopting IBM’s  LotusLive suite for of collaboration and communication. LotusLive suite enable Panasonic workforce to communicate and collaborate more efficiently with their global network of customers, partners and suppliers through a cloud-based community. Panasonic will adopt IBM’s LotusLive.com services for Web conferencing, file sharing, instant messaging and project management. The company will also implement LotusLive Connections for business social networking between employees, partners and suppliers to find and share the right insight when needed. As part of this investment in open IBM technology, Panasonic will migrate employees from Microsoft Exchange or other collaboration software to LotusLive for email, calendaring and contact management. Panasonic will present more details at IBM’s annual Lotusphere Conference January 17 – 21 in Orlando, Florida.

Mitsuhiro Aoyama, Vice President Corporate Information Systems Company, Panasonic Corporation Siad,

LotusLive is an integral vehicle for our employees to truly function as a globally integrated enterprise. It will allow us to work securely with our extended enterprise of Panasonic partners and customers as if they are all in the same location, bringing the promise of quicker, more efficient teamwork and commerce worldwide.

Sean Poulley, Vice President, IBM Cloud Collaboration,Said

Panasonic would only make this strategic move with the assurance that their daily business workflow will be safeguarded from costly interruptions and intrusions as millions of existing LotusLive users know. When responsible businesses such as Panasonic move to the cloud, they want innovative technologies without compromising security, reliability or privacy. That’s why they choose IBM.

IBM and Amazon teamed up for providing pay-as-you-go IBM development and production versions of IBM Information Management database servers, IBM Lotus content management, and IBM WebSphere portal and middleware products, all running on Novell’s SUSE Linux on Amazon EC2. Developers can also use their existing licenses of IBM software with Amazon cloud computing platform.  IBM Passport Advantage Customers can install and run IBM Programs in the Amazon EC2 cloud environment using Program licenses obtained from IBM on a Processor Value Unit (PVU) basis.  The table below lists the number of PVU licenses required per IBM Program for each Amazon EC2 Instance Type currently available as of the table publish date. Charges for the Amazon Web Services EC2 service are separate and remain the responsibility of the customer.

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The IBM (International Business Machines Corp.) is going to launch a virtual desktop applications based on Linux that runs on a backroom server and doesn’t require Microsoft software. The virtual Linux Desktop will cost around $59 to $289 per user. The price will depend upon the software & services selected by you. IBM offers special Software package for corporate customer, they can save ~ $800(max) per user, instead of using Microsoft’s costly package such as Microsoft’s Vista operating system, Office suite and collaboration tools. So IBM has planned a lot to cut the Microsoft’s Corporate Customers but it’s all depend on the success of IBM’s  Virtual Linux Desktop. One advantage of that is- thin clients don’t get viruses, and Linux servers make it much harder for viruses to do a lot of damage. 

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IBM opens one Cloud Computing data center in India. Apart from this data center IBM has opened three other cloud computing data centers also. These for new cloud computing data centers will help enterprises, universities and governments test Web-based services and applications. The Society for the Promotion of Excellence in Brazilian Software (SOFTEX) and Vietnam Technology and Telecommunications (VNTT) are some of the early customers for the new cloud computing centers. With these four new data centers IBM has total 13 data centers.

Ponani Gopalakrishnan, vice president of IBM’s India Software Lab, Said

Cloud computing is a relatively new technology, and issues such as usage models need to be studied. The cloud computing model allows businesses and consumers to remotely access computers over the Internet to access services, IBM said. Using shared infrastructure like a cloud computing center allows businesses to manage and provision IT infrastructure dynamically depending on the requirements of business. The new center in India is positioned as an experimental platform for businesses and academic institutions to deploy and test applications.  While the platform would be offered free to academic institutions that IBM partners with, businesses will be charged. There are a number of production-scale applications using cloud computing available. Academic institutions in India are expected to work on using cloud computing for e-government applications and researching deployment models for cloud computing. Inadequate communications bandwidth in emerging economies like India will not be a bottleneck for the adoption of cloud computing. There are a lot of mobile applications built around cloud computing, for example, that run on less than broadband-grade connectivity.

Source : IBM- Cloud computing spreads in emerging countries

  NASA( Center for Computational Sciences) has nearly tripled it’s super computer power by deploying IBM’s iDataPlex servers. NASA uses these super computers to simulate earth climate and weather. NASA also uses these super computers to find relationship between our planet’s and sun. NASA, scientists are integrating the iDataPlex servers with their existing system. The resulting system will have 1,024 quad-core Intel Xeon processors and raising performance capabilities from 25 to 67 teraflops (trillion calculations per second).

Dr. Phil Webster, NCCS Project Manager and Chief of the Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office at Goddard Space Flight Center, said

By nearly tripling Discover’s performance, NASA scientists will be able to run models with higher resolution and greater fidelity to the underlying physical phenomena. IBM’s iDataPlex solution for NCCS will provide critical compute power for current and future NASA Earth and space science studies.

Computational projects running on Discover include projections of Earth’s 21st century climate, a reanalysis of global weather observations taken since the satellite era began in 1979, modeling of solar activity that affects weather and communications, and complex simulations of merging black holes and solar system formation.

Source : New NASA Supercomputer Will Play Critical Role as Scientists Simulate Climate, Weather and Solar Activity

IBM’s Customer Information Control System (CICS) is an on-line teleprocessing system developed by IBM. By providing a sophisticated control and service database/data communication system, the application developer can concentrate on fulfilling specific business needs rather than on communication and internal system details. CICS allows data to be transmitted from the terminal to the host computer, have the data processed, access files/databases, and then has data to be transmitted from the terminal to the host computer, have the data processed, access files/databases, and then have data transmitted back to the terminal. To accomplish that, CICS uses a telecommunication package such as VTAM or TCAM and various file access methods: VSAM, DL/1, DB2, etc.

Functionality

• Data Communications: An interface between the terminal and printers with CICS
  via a telecommunication access method (TCAM or VTAM).
• Multi Region Operation(MRO), through which more than one CICS
  region of a system can communicate Intersystem Communication (ISC), through which one CICS region of a system can communicate with other CICS regions in other systems
• Application Programming:Interfaces with programming languages such as COBOL and Assembler
  Command level translator
• An Execution Diagnostic Facility (EDF)
• A Command Interpreter
• Data Handling: An interface with database access methods such as DB2, DL/1, and VSAM
  An interface with error checking and reporting facilities

Terminology