Building a Smarter Planet. A Smarter Planet Blog.

Later this week IBM opens a new lab in United Kingdom. Manchester to be precise.

• Watch it live: 13 May, Thursday 11:30 BST .
• Facebook event
• Tweet stream (#ibmsmartsys)

Rod Adkins, Senior VP, Systems and Technology Group, traveled to Manchester (at the risk of being stranded thanks to the ash cloud) to cut the ribbon and welcome the lab into IBM.

Manchester Lab in the heart of the city

The lab creates systems software for the Power system, focusing on privacy, virtulisation and opimisation – so clients can manage workloads and reduce storage costs.

The IBM Lab has its origins in Transitive, a spin-off company from University of Manchester, acquired by IBM in 2009 and many of the Engineers are former graduates of the University. The acquisition formed part of IBM’s ongoing strategy to help clients optimise the efficiency and productivity of their computing infrastructure and improve the utilisation of the servers that run them.

I spoke to a couple of the guys at the lab last week who are looking forward to the new challenges and opportunities that being part of IBM brings. They are already working with teams across the globe, so this is no outpost but a core part of our integrated team that is working on enabling better and quicker systems migration and consolidation.

So tomorrow I’ll be taking a train up to Manchester to see the guys and video a few of them, hopefully if I get time I’ll post a couple before the event tomorrow.

Lots more on the website about Smarter Systems.

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