IBM has strengthened its emerging market presence with the opening of three centres of excellence located in China, Mexico and India providing back office processing for its customers in banking, retail and service management arenas.

IBM has been accelerating its focus on the high economic growth potential emerging markets, which acounted for 18 per cent of its geographic revenue in the second quarter of 2008, and together grew 21 per cent.

IBM's business from the Brazil, Russia, India and China subset grew 31 per cent in the second quarter, led by "explosive growth in India".

"These results demonstrate that IBM has the ability to thrive in emerging markets," said Bruno Di Leo, IBM general manager, growth markets. "Our continued investments give IBM a competitive edge; global reach and scale; and services and products that deliver genuine value to clients wherever they do business."

Shanghai banking centre of excellence
IBM will establish a branch of its worldwide banking centre of excellence in Shanghai to support China's banking clients and to address their issues in core banking systems and payments. The banking centre will bring together world-class business and technology experts to design and implement next generation payment and core banking systems for China's leading banks.

The banking centre of excellence in China will be staffed with a worldwide team of banking experts and leverage assets, infrastructures and deep skills from across IBM to develop local banking value-add offerings, form strategy for payment and core system renovation, and improve performance and scalability of existing architecture.

The centre will offer high-end, banking industry related expertise to tackle critical customer needs and to bring global reach to the local banking clients. IBM's worldwide banking centre of excellence has already been working with many of the leading banks in China to help modernise their back-office operations.

With the IBM worldwide banking centre of excellence in China and other existing IBM resources such as the China System Centre, the local banks will benefit from IBM's ability to quickly assemble a targeted set of skills, capabilities and business frameworks to meet the clients' exact requirements -- from end-to-end services and technologies, industry expertise, to independent software vendors (ISV) collaboration.

Banks will work with experts from IBM and its ISV partners to leverage industry standards including International Organization for Standardization (ISO) messaging formats, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), IBM's world-class middleware, and the discipline and models of Information Framework (IFW) to support specific renovation solutions.

The new banking centre of excellence in China will join an existing global network of IBM banking centers that were established in 2007. The network includes centers at IBM's Silicon Valley Lab in California, operated by the IBM 'high performance on demand solutions' (HiPODS) Lab; the IBM Poughkeepsie Lab in New York; the IBM Software Solutions Lab in Seoul, Korea, Hanoi, Vietnam and Johannesburg, South Africa. Together, the centers represent a multi-million dollar investment by IBM as a commitment to help worldwide banking clients become successful.

Guadalajara retail innovation centre
IBM is opening its first retail innovation centre in Latin America, a cross-industry facility designed to help companies enhance the shopping experience for consumers. The centre provides clients a place to learn about, create and test in-store retail solutions that can help them build advocacy and loyalty for their brands.

IBM plans to showcase some of its most advanced, industry-leading, point-of-sale and self-checkout technologies in stores, as well as in the mobile and e-commerce space, at the new retail centre.

The Guadalajara retail innovation centre is equipped with a consolidated and experienced team of consultants and professionals specializing in meeting and evaluating client needs to achieve the best solution that allows them to create demand generation and customer strategies. The GRIC has a solutions Centre with demos, trend maps and solution briefings through IT updates and proofs of concept, designed to provide live demos of software, hardware and services solutions using last generation technology.

Service management centre of excellence in India
Earlier last week IBM opened the IBM service management centre of excellence in India to function as the regional hub for IBM Tivoli service management software and strategy (See: IBM opens service management centre of excellence in Pune). The Centre has been designed to develop specialised focus and skills in high value areas such as telecom, security, automation and asset management. This first-of-its-kind centre for IBM has been established in Pune.

The Pune centre will be staffed by IBM service management experts from around the world and will provide infrastructure and resources for enablement and education; client engagement support to sales team and business partners; and facilities for proof of concept, demos and workshops. It also will offer certification and joint education programs with local universities, access to industry models, best practices and proven methodologies based on IBM's worldwide service management experience.

IBM's approach to service management is based on delivering integration of software and services to provide organizations better visibility into IT assets and applications across an entire business, while also enabling better security, compliance management and automation.

Service management addresses the uncertainty faced by organisations as they manage faster, broader and more uncertain change. Built on an open, service oriented architecture (SOA), IBM's approach to service management helps organizations improve IT services and align them with business goals while keeping costs low.