IBM Inks $1B, 10-Year Cloud Deal With EVRY

IBM announced it has signed a $1 billion (£660m) 10-year partnership with Nordic IT services company EVRY in which IBM will serve as EVRY’s primary cloud infrastructure services provider.

As part of the agreement, IBM will enhance EVRY’s infrastructure services, the companies said. This includes providing services running on IBM’s SoftLayer Cloud infrastructure based in the data center in Fet/Oslo that IBM is launching next year.

IBM said EVRY will continue to lead the development of value-added solutions and services and combine its knowledge of the local market with the use of innovative cloud technology and global scale from IBM. In return, EVRY’s customers will benefit from a faster time-to-market through IBM’s infrastructure solutions, according to the companies. EVRY will maintain responsibility for managing its relationships and delivering services to its customers.

Nordic champion

“A leading infrastructure business is core to EVRY becoming a Nordic champion,” Bjorn Ivroth, CEO of EVRY, said in a statement. “It is the foundation from which we build solutions that create business value and business outcomes for our customers. EVRY has started this transformation journey, but in order to deliver the best infrastructure solutions in the market, we need to accelerate the ongoing transformation of our infrastructure business.”

Ivroth added that EVRY selected IBM as a global service provider and as a service delivery model for its basic infrastructure business. “Customers will benefit from a faster time-to-market for leading-edge infrastructure, including new cloud based solutions,” he said. “This strategic move allows EVRY to focus on being a customer-centric organization with focus on value-added services and solutions built on leading technology.”

By running these services on IBM Cloud, EVRY’s customers, across a wide range of industries, including banking and finance, government, energy, health care and retail, will gain access to flexible and scalable hybrid cloud infrastructure.

The news showcases IBM’s cloud expansion globally and the rate of hybrid cloud adoption by global enterprises. In addition, IBM also added support for more languages, including German, French, Italian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, Japanese, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and Korean, to its SoftLayer services. IBM has opened more than 40 global data centers worldwide to help customers manage requirements to keep their data local due to regulations.

“Our partnership demonstrates how IBM’s expertise, technology and services can help EVRY adapt to new market conditions and opportunities while having trusted infrastructure services supporting the ongoing operations,” Martin Jetter, senior vice president of IBM Global Technology Services, said in a statement.

“The Nordic region has always been at the forefront of adopting new technologies early, and we are working with EVRY as they accelerate the enablement of their clients to lead in the digital era. IBM’s IT Infrastructure and cloud capabilities provide a perfect foundation for EVRY to create and sell advanced cloud-based solutions for their customers across the full range of customers and industries they serve.”

In other IBM Cloud news, earlier this week IBM officially launched its Bluemix Local service, bringing it out of preview. Bluemix Local enables organizations to use IBM’s Bluemix platform-as-a-service technology behind their own firewall.

Big Blue debuted Bluemix Local at its InterConnect 2015 conference last February and accelerated the company’s hybrid cloud capabilities by delivering this cloud platform that enables enterprises to quickly and securely build apps and deploy them across public, private and on-premises environments.

“Though Bluemix Local is designed to run behind an organization’s firewall, it is also fully integrated and synced with the Bluemix cloud service,” said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT. “That means that companies can develop apps that leverage internal/external data and APIs, and are also easy to keep current with all related platforms. This speaks to the way that Bluemix Local adds to IBM’s cloud strategy, as well as its Bluemix efforts.”

Originally published on eWeek.