IBM to Build Cloud Development and Test Environment for Nippon Life Insurance

TOKYO and ARMONK, N.Y.: Nissay Information Technology (Tokyo: NISSAYIT) and IBM Japan (NYSE: IBM) today announced they will jointly build a cloud-based development and test environment to create mission critical Web systems for Nippon Life Insurance (NISSAY). The project launched in May 2010, with the test and development environment expected to go live in September 2010.

The new development and test environment maximizes the benefits of NISSAY’s existing resources, while allowing for flexible allocation of IT resources depending on development workload.

The average enterprise devotes up to 50 percent of its entire technology infrastructure to development and test, but typically up to 90 percent of it remains idle. IBM has seen that taking advantage of cloud computing within development and testing environments can help reduce IT labor costs by 50 percent, improve quality and drastically reduce time to market.

The new cloud environment will allow NISSAY developers to procure new test and development environments in hours — a process that previously could take up to a month. To prevent any impact on ongoing development projects and maintain test quality, NISSAY will maintain a traditional test environment that allocates resources in a fixed format. The traditional test environment can be transformed to the cloud in the future.

The new development and test environment uses IBM’s high performance UNIX server IBM Power Systems and the operational management software Tivoli Service Automation Manager.

IBM Power Systems can quickly scale to virtualize 1,000 logical partitions, so that the cloud computing environment and traditional test environment can co-exist. IBM Tivoli Service Automation Manager delivers standard application and design templates, allowing users to obtain necessary IT resources easily and flexibly.

For more information on IBM’s cloud computing portfolio, research and labs, visit ibm.com/cloud.