IBM yesterday announced the world's largest private cloud computing environment for business analytics, which will provide IBM sales teams and developers new levels of insight to better meet the needs of clients worldwide. The cloud will launch initially with more than a petabyte of data, the equivalent of more than 300 billion ATM transactions.

IBM also announced a new solution, the IBM Smart Analytics Cloud, for clients to build their own private cloud environments based on the same Cloud infrastructure that IBM is using internally.

Internally called Blue Insight, IBM's cloud environment democratises information, providing access to a variety of client and market data regardless of where an employee sits in the company. It gathers information from nearly 100 different information warehouses and data stores, providing analytics on more than a petabyte (1,000 terabytes or 1,000,000 gigabytes) of data.

By turning that data into insight for IBM's sales force and development communities, IBM will be able to deliver more value in the solutions and services it offers to its clients.

More than 200,000 IBMers will have access to the new system.

"This new cloud and the insights that our analytics will provide are the next step in the continuous transformation of our business to better serve our clients," said Pat Toole, chief information officer of IBM. "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 the kind of client-focused value that businesses are asking of their IT organizations."

Structured and unstructured data will be available in the cloud and accessible from anywhere to provide IBM employees and executives with specific insights:

Sales teams will have a deeper understanding of a client's relationship with the whole of IBM from around the world - not just their region or product group - and be able to better predict which products and services would deliver the most client value based on this view.

Product development teams will be able to quickly analyse sales information, industry trends and customer perceptions, and adjust product planning and development specifications accordingly.

A manufacturing process engineer will be able to evaluate real-time data on the plant floor to identify trends and adjust manufacturing processes as needed to improve yields and reduce shipment delivery times. 

Blue Insight will run on a System z10 mainframe computer with 48 processors (32 processors for production, 18 processors for development and test environments) and strong cryptography - capable of handling up to 10,000 secure transactions per second, with redundant backup support.