Stakeholders yesterday got a chance to view some of IBM’s latest products for the Fijian market.

These included the power servers and storage portfolio relevant for the Fijian market.

This was during an event organised by Datec (Fiji) Limited in conjunction with IBM New Zealand at the Holiday Inn Suva.

Client executive IBM (New Zealand) Limited, Mark Hayden said the V5000 storage family was the most relevant for the Fijian market.

“It comes in three sizes; small, medium and large. I think the small and medium is the most appropriate for the Fijian market,” he said.

“Power servers are something that we haven’t done here for a while as a particular niche within certain applications. It runs on certain applications really well.”

Mr Hayden believes there is an untapped demand potential in this area, with the new elected Government here, there’s lots of opportunities opening up, hence, IBM has supported all through the past few years and also wanted to come back today and talk about how we can help further.”

Industry here

Mr Hayden commented Fiji’s ICT industry is expanding quite significantly over the next five to ten years.

“There’s more investment coming into the country,” he said.

“The areas of potential here in the Fijian market are for storage. It’s across all companies but for the power servers, yes there’s a particular niche and that would be typically for customers who run large databases and large customer base. So we are looking at banks, telecommunications like Telecom Fiji, Vodafone and insurance companies.

“So people with a whole lot of customer data – that’s where potentially the workloads will run very effectively in that power solutions.”

Mr Hayden said there will be lots of cost savings and lot of efficiencies particularly with the power solutions they have.

“You’ll see awful lot of rationalisation of the amount of machines you need to run certain workloads,” he said.

“The whole value, the product value the power systems is that you don’t need to run lots and lots on Intel server.  You can run multiple workloads on our power solutions which means you have only one box to worry about rather than multiple boxes. So lots of management savings and cost efficiencies.”

Infrastructure

Mr Hayden suggested Fiji should quite relentlessly focus on getting its physical infrastructure back in place.

“Once its back, we will see IT pickup its demand in the ICT space. They will be looking at efficiencies and how they can save money through the way they do things,” he said.

Mr Hayden also mentioned IBM has a platform of other products and services largely in the software space. So we will be working when our business partners are here to see the right software products for Fiji.

“More and more customers are looking forward to having what they software as a server, where they don’t have to buy the licenses, you pay as a monthly fee.  We see that very much starting to pick up here as well means you are not tied in completely to buying a certain license because if it doesn’t work for you, you can just turn it off at the end of the month.

“I think this is a service model where we will become increasingly important in Fiji in the next few years.”

EDITED BY: RACHNA LAL