IBM Helps Shanghai Research Institute of China Telecom Corporate Limited Revamp Its Innovation Pipeline

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that the Shanghai Research Institute of China Telecom Corporate Limited (STTRI) has chosen IBM’s Innovation Factory to support collaborative innovation and accelerate the development of emerging telecommunication services for the Chinese market.

Made in IBM Labs, Innovation Factory can help accelerate the innovation process through open collaboration based on Web 2.0 social networking. IBM Innovation Factory is designed to capture the innovation process from idea creation to commercialization, speeding up co-creation among employees, partners, software developers and subscribers through online communities.

Over the past six months, STTRI partnered with the IBM High Performance On-Demand Solutions (HiPODS) Labs and IBM China Research Lab to successfully launch Innovation Factory as the platform for China Telecom “Innovation Works,” a tool to facilitate enterprise innovation activities. It will support the second Innovation Contest at STTRI, which encourages institution-wide collaboration to rapidly scale up production of new ideas for service offerings. Innovation Works encourages STTRI employees to continuously innovate by sharing new ideas, partnering with other employees and providing real-time feedback on ideas.

The strategic partnership between STTRI and IBM, which started in 2005, is a natural extension of previous joint research and development programs between STTRI and IBM’s China Research Lab (CRL). CRL helped STTRI launch its first innovation contest in 2006. Through this successful collaboration, both sides decided to take the partnership to the next level -- Innovation Factory.

Mr. An Ming Li, Director of STTRI, said, “China Telecom, together with its strategic partner IBM, successfully launched Innovation Works. IBM’s Innovation Factory solution has enabled our researchers to be more productive in generating new ideas. We look forward to the next phase of collaboration.”

The Innovation Factory solution developed for STTRI will be demonstrated today in Shanghai by Dr. Willy Chiu, Vice President of High Performance On-Demand Solutions, IBM Software Group.

“Our partnership with STTRI has inaugurated an exciting era of open innovation in one of the fastest-growing technology marketplaces in the world,” said Dr. Chiu. “IBM enables China Telecom to quickly identify and create new and innovative telecom services that meet a customer’s latest requirements, so that its growing customer base can quickly access the functionality needed in today’s evolving Chinese marketplace for optimal business performance.”

IBM’s Innovation Factory was first announced in March 2007 to help companies rapidly conceive and conduct trials on new products and services. Its software components include collaboration technologies from IBM Lotus Connections.

IBM provides Innovation Factory both as a hosted service running on its cloud computing infrastructure at the Almaden Research Center, and as an onsite solution deployed at customer sites. IBM has enhanced Innovation Factory to include idea management capabilities. Further enhancements, including additional Web 2.0 and social networking tools, are planned to be released in 2008.