IBM expanded its Cloud consulting services portfolio with a customizable cloud strategy offering for industry and line of business buyers.
The IT major is also developing a catalog of fast-start industry solutions delivered as a service for cloud-based applications.
Sanjay Rishi, managing partner, IBM Cloud Consulting Services, said that the agenda of front office decision makers places a premium on flexibility and the ability to experiment. With these new cloud offerings, IBM will help front office leaders rapidly deploy business content for business value.
A recent IBM survey reports that during the next three years, the cloud’s strategic importance to top decision makers, from CEOs and CMOs to HR, finance and procurement executives, is poised to double from 34 percent to 72 percent – surpassing their IT counterparts at 58 percent.
IBM assessment tools are tailored to each client’s desired business outcomes. IBM cloud adoption framework and the IBM Cloud Workload Analysis Tool are designed to analyze an existing environment and determine the cloud computing model best suited for the business model.
Using the tool, IBM consultants help the client identify and prioritize the business areas and workloads that, when migrated to a cloud computing model, deliver the most benefit by reducing costs and improving service delivery.
To further jump-start a client’s deployment to the cloud, IBM is developing a catalog of pre-integrated solutions that address priority business needs industry by industry, while making cloud easier to adopt and consume for line of business leaders.
IBM fast-start industry solutions, which are hosted on a private cloud using SoftLayer and offered as a managed service through IBM Global Business Services, are designed to meet the growing demand from clients for rapid deployment, implementation and experimentation.
This as-a-service model enables clients in vertical industries – such as banking, insurance, retail, telecom and energy and utilities – to have key business applications up and running very quickly without the need to provision additional infrastructure and compute power. This advantage significantly reduces the time it takes to deploy new applications from weeks or months to a matter of hours or days, and accelerates time-to-value for their business.
IBM Insurance Service Hub Cloud – a communication platform on the cloud — replaces traditional bilateral paper-based data exchange with digital information delivered in one standardized interface. The platform provides accurate data to drive faster, more efficient business processes, such as invoice provisioning, claims processing and reimbursement.
The shared cloud computing platform comes with analytics for semantic analysis of diagnostic texts, and with a mobile communication infrastructure that is fundamental to an insurer’s ability to redefine customer relationships and improve the customer experience.
