IBM said it will deploy an internal cloud computing environment to its more than 200,000 employees to give them access to a gamut of real-time critical business information, ranging from customer relationship information to regional sales trends, regardless of their location.

Called Blue Insight, the project will make more than a whopping petabyte of information instantly available to its employees to help them make better decisions. Moreover, IBM wants to make the service's architecture, which it calls IBM Smart Analytics Cloud, available to customers.

"This new model of cloud computing will provide our employees with a single place to access real business insights, improve standards compliance, and create a repository of best practices throughout the company," said IBM CIO Pat Toole in a statement. "I expect this first of its kind approach will help drive both new growth opportunities as well as have a significant impact in cost savings, which is exactly what businesses are asking today of their cutting edge IT organizations."

The service will run on a 48-processor IBM System Z10 mainframe that can handle up to 10,000 secure transactions per second. Its commercial offering also runs on an a System z mainframe and will include business intelligence tools from IBM Cognos 8 BI.

In related news, AT&T introduced Synaptic Compute as a Service, which is designed to allow IT employees to store and maintain internal applications using AT&T's cloud. The unique feature is the ability for businesses to ratchet up capacity and availability as needed, thus saving businesses money because they don't have to maintain full network capacity around the clock.

For more:
- see this InformationWeek article [1]
- read this Cnet article [2]

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