IBM Opens Cloud Computing Center in South Africa

IT Infrastructure in Africa continues to grow as the global economy looks for untapped areas to lead in areas of growth, innovation and development. This morning IBM made the announcement that it would be opening new data centers (with an emphasis on cloud computing) in South Africa and China.

The new centers are designed to help clients in Africa and China tackle issues they would otherwise not be able to address. For example, using IBM’s new centers, a university could access the computational power of a supercomputer to analyze data and determine how diseases might spread in a region or how climate changes will affect natural resources.

“These centers will enable our clients in China and sub-Saharan Africa to better embrace the services-based, global economy,” said Nick Donofrio, IBM’s executive vice president of Innovation and Technology. “Much like the power-generation and manufacturing infrastructures before it, the data center continues to consolidate for scale and become increasingly more efficient and interconnected with partners and the public Internet infrastructure. From that, a global value chain of information technology is emerging.”

IBM has set aside $120 million over two years in sub-Saharan Africa to capitalize on enormous populations of skills and expertise and to capture rapid growth in emerging market countries as they heavily invest in IT to modernize their societies and build out their fundamental business infrastructures in areas such as government services, banking and telecommunications. The new centers are part of IBM’s overall investment in the world’s growth markets, to which the company committed an additional $1.6 billion earlier this year