IBM announced it will establish the first Cloud Computing Center for software companies in China, which will be situated at the new Wuxi Tai Hu New Town Science and Education Industrial Park in Wuxi, China.

The center will offer emerging Chinese software companies the ability to tap into a virtual computing environment to support their development activities. It will be established through an agreement signed today between IBM and Wuxi Tai Lake Industry Investment and Development Company Limited.

IBM will work with Wuxi Tai Lake Industry Investment and Development Company Limited; the Wuxi municipal government; and its business partners to build the China Cloud Computing Center, which will be a shared facility providing each software company in the park with its own virtualized computing resource. For example, a company will be able to use the allocated resource for designing, developing and testing its software products. Such virtual environments can replace the traditional data center model, in which each company owns and manages its own hardware and software.

Companies in the park will be able to access these common services provided by the center at any time -- just as they use utilities and other shared services. The technologies being offered to the community include IBM Rational software development tools, WebSphere Application Server software and DB2 database software running on IBM System x, System p and BladeCenter servers. IBM Tivoli systems management software will manage the cloud computing environment.

"Being one of the model zones to offer outsourcing services in China, the city of Wuxi is committed to providing companies in our park with the environment and tools that are needed for rapid growth," said Mr. Zhu Weiping, Party Secretary of Bin Hu District, Wuxi Municipal Government. "We are proud to be the first in the world to offer the power of cloud computing to companies in Wuxi Tai Hu New Town Science and Education Industrial Park."

Wuxi is classified as an investment zone by the Chinese government and has been named a "National Model City of Science and Technology Advancement" for five consecutive years.

"Cloud computing is helping to foster the growth of new software companies in China," said Steve Mills, Senior Vice President and Group Executive, IBM Software Group. "Like many new software companies seeking growth opportunities both locally and abroad, these Chinese software companies will rely on technical infrastructures built on open standards and delivered as a service. This open approach to computing will help them deliver innovation and pursue global market opportunities."

The Wuxi Tai Hu New Town Science and Education Industrial Park will be home to dozens of new software companies and represents a multimillion dollar investment. iSoftStone, one of the new software companies in the park, plans to develop account settlement software for the financial services industry.

"The China Cloud Computing Center represents a milestone in service-oriented computing," said T. W. Liu, the chairman and CEO of iSoftStone. "It will allow companies in the Wuxi Software Park to leapfrog to the newest computing models and will provide an efficient IT platform for software development."

Cloud computing is an approach to shared information technology (IT) infrastructure in which large pools of systems are linked together to provide IT services. Cloud computing allows corporate data centers to operate more like the Internet by enabling computing resources to be accessed and shared as virtual resources in a secure and scalable manner. The center will be built using IBM's "Blue Cloud" technologies, a series of cloud computing offerings based on open standards and open source software which link together computers to deliver Web 2.0 capabilities such as mashups, open collaboration, social networking and mobile commerce.

IBM has established a significant research and development presence in China. There are currently more than 3,200 IBM engineers and scientists employed by IBM labs in Beijing and Shanghai. Engineers from the High Performance on Demand Solutions (HiPODS) team in IBM China will work with their colleagues in the IBM Silicon Valley Laboratory to establish the center.