ECS and IBM Partner to Deliver SmartCloud Solutions

IBM Provides ECS with Enterprise Grade Cloud Service to Help Clients Transform their IT Infrastructure & Business

Petaling Jaya, 3 April 2013 – ECS Pericomp Sdn Bhd (ECS), a subsidiary of ECS ICT Berhad and IBM today signed a business partnership agreement on SmartCloud Solutions for enterprises. ECS will now be IBM's first business partner in Malaysia under the IBM SmartCloud Solutions that consists of cloud computing solutions for enterprises. IBM SmartCloud Solutions are optimised for mission-critical, enterprise workloads with the scalable flexibility of a public cloud.

All IBM offerings are designed for business use and offer an entry point to cloud computing whether a client is designing their own virtual private cloud, deploying cloud service, or consuming cloud workload applications.

“We see a growing demand for cloud computing solutions in Malaysia. IBM's research shows that Cloud could yield between 25 and 30 percent or more in savings for organisations, thus shifting investment from maintaining infrastructure to pursuing new projects while reducing cost. Cloud can also free up money and resources for such enterprises to pursue expansion initiatives,” said Paul Moung, Managing Director of IBM Malaysia.

The IBM SmartCloud delivers computing options with virtual IT infrastructure support; a standard level of security for sharing physical IT resources among many tenants; and dedicated computing environments for an extra level of protection. The pricing is on a 'pay per use' model, based on IBM's SmartCloud amount of usage and capacity, on a monthly basis.  ECS can then bill their customers accordingly based on their business model.

“IBM will act as a cloud infrastructure provider to ECS. Last month, IBM introduced for the first time a new software - IBM SmartCloud Storage Access that lets organisations set up secure private storage clouds and users store information on the company’s internal cloud. The new package features a Web-based self-service portal that lets any user create an account, set up the amount of storage they need, and then start uploading files via the cloud – all with just a few clicks and without the assistance of an IT administrator,” Moung added.

ECS is an authorised distributor of ICT products in Malaysia, and provides enterprise systems, as well as professional and technical services. The company serves its reseller channel covering a wide range of industries, including government, telecommunication, corporate customers, manufacturing, and finance institutions in Malaysia. As an IBM business partner, ECS will provide the necessary technical support for small to mid-sized enterprises that are moving into cloud services for their computing needs. With this partnership, ECS aims to distribute cloud services and solutions provided by IBM.

“It was a great choice to partner with IBM and equip ourselves with a new virtual server that will provide us with business resilience and disaster recovery capabilities. Besides the immense cost savings compared to doing this ourselves, we are able to offer our customers the very latest IT solutions, using innovative systems and the latest in technology. With IBM’s well known expertise and breath of solutions, we are confident this will reap great benefits for our customers,” said Foo Sen Chin, Managing Director of ECS.

IBM is one of the pioneers in Asia to offer multi-platform cloud service. The SmartCloud Enterprise is part of IBM's larger SmartCloud framework, which includes cloud architecture for private and hybrid cloud, as well as Software as a Service (SaaS) business solutions. Powered by 6 state-of-the art Green IBM data centers (Point of Delivery), the SCE availability includes industry-leading IBM service-level agreements. With an easy to use self-service portal, customers can easily provision and de-provision IT resources from any point of delivery in the world.