NEWS BRIEFS

London, ENGLAND — One year after the opening of a $3 million Centre in Poughkeespie, NY, IBM has announced the creation of the European e-business Centre at its Montpellier’s site. This represents a significant IBM investment.

This Centre is dedicated to the design, the architecture’s infrastructure, the server platform choices and complex prototypes of e-business applications. This Centre will offer customers the opportunity to explore the leading edge of e- business applications and develop new approaches to e-commerce. This think tank uses IBM’s skills, experience and product range to help businesses evolve from a simple website and online transaction processing to the next level of e- commerce.

Customers bring their IT teams to the Centre to co-operate on developing a solution to integrate their systems for advanced e-commerce. Bringing together in one place IBM expertise in hardware, software, networking, research and services, the Design Centre gives customers the opportunity to create solutions in an intensive environment.

One customer commented that just by bringing their key IT staff to one table, with the IBMers as facilitators, they were able to accomplish in a few short weeks what normally would have taken at least a year.

Customers with “unique” problems are invited to the Design Centre – dot-coms looking for the most reliable, scalable architecture available; established companies looking to integrate older systems with the latest for advanced e- commerce; and companies in between searching for creative solutions.

The companies benefit from their time at the Design Centre and so does IBM. One of the reasons that these companies are invited is that IBM sees an opportunity to learn something too. IBM researchers get to hear directly from the customers what solutions are needed, what changes might be made and what works and what doesn’t. They take this information right back to the lab.

The integration of business systems on the Internet is what e-business is all about. The next, more advanced step is e-transaction processing, in which all e- business-related IT transactions are completed end-to-end, without intervention. E-transaction processing is the enabling technology that permits companies to create systems that can handle both the increasing volume and the increasing sophistication of e-business transactions in a highly secure environment.

Since the arrival of the Internet, most companies are extremely interested in this new communication tool and nearly all of them have created their own site and the number of Internet transactions has increased dramatically. Businesses now need to respond to the evolution that is taking place and to the demands of Internet users: the reliability of e-commerce, the fact that customers are prepared to buy on line and to exchange data with suppliers and customers on the Web. Companies must have the best e-commerce environment in place in the quickest possible time. This is the reason why IBM has created the European Design Centre for e-transaction processing.

Benefits of the Centre include the following:

— Enables the integration of solutions into existing IT environments incorporating AS/400, Netfinity, RS/6000, and S/390 technologies, including Linux on IBM platforms;

— Provides end-to-end solution prototyping based on customer-supplied applications, software and workloads; Centre even houses competitor products;

— Co-operates and shares knowledge with IBM Global Services and IBM Advanced Technical Support Centres;

— A cost-free service, open by invitation to select customers who are committed to building leading-edge e-business systems;

— Enables skills transfer as well as the opportunity to build and run solutions based on actual business data.

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