IBM Invests £2 Million in Scotland for New UK Services Business to Run Mid-Sized Enterprise Data Centers

ARMONK, NY .- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced plans to open a new Collocation data center at its Greenock facility in Scotland. The data center delivers services to help mid-sized enterprises consolidate and centralize their information technology (IT) infrastructures in a single secure and resilient location, allowing them to significantly reduce costs and staff management time.

The center offers facilities typically only available to large enterprises such as energy efficient cooling, dedicated electric infrastructure backed up by diesel generators, 24 hour security, alarm monitoring and CCTV, and resilient internet connections.

In addition to IBM equipment, customer-owned equipment will be welcomed in the data center, giving clients the choice of retaining management and monitoring responsibility for the equipment (Collocation), or requesting IBM to perform basic management and monitoring functions (Collocation Plus). Clients can move their existing back-office hardware to the facility and manage it remotely.

Matthew Hawkins, SirsiDynix Chief Operating Officer, whose company uses the service, said, “SirsiDynix cares deeply about its customers’ Software as a Service (SaaS) experience; therefore, we thoroughly explored Collocation partner options for several months. During our research we focused on strong features such as power, cooling, redundancy (for backup and fail-safe purposes) and cost at the facility level, and company stability at the corporate level. Our options were narrowed down to two companies and IBM was by far the best vendor suited to meet our growing needs in the SaaS market.”

“This new service aims to offer quick financial returns to a medium sized business by removing the challenge of securing and maintaining their data centers, so potential savings can be ploughed back into their business,” said Alex Reardon, director, General Business Sector, UK & Ireland for IBM. “IBM has the skills to run, manage and monitor client IT, ensuring information is secure at all times.”

The new Collocation data center in Greenock is being built to IBM’s strategic “green” data center standards. The modern design and build of the data center will utilize best practices in cooling and power management where the technology has been designed to take advantage of the free cooling on offer by the local climatic conditions.

IBM has committed £540 million globally to deliver technologies that help clients dramatically increase the level of energy efficiency in their data centers. IBM has engaged with more than 2,000 clients to deliver hardware, software and services technologies that have helped them reduce data center energy consumption and cut energy costs by as much as 40 percent.

IBM has had a presence in Inverclyde for 57 years. This new data center complements the services offered by the IBM Greenock location which is now a Service based facility. Greenock plays a key role within IBM in Scotland, offering a highly skilled flexible workforce providing key support to IBM’s global growth strategy.