In years past IT managers were willing to be saddled with the dreaded vendor lock-in. They were willing to let their infrastructure and software choices be dictated by one or two vendors in the hope of better operation efficiency and support. Those days, however, are long gone. Most IT shops are platform and vendor neutral. But building a server architecture that can allow for true agnosticism is challenging. In this paper, learn five actionable ways your IT organization can leverage IBM's System X technology to build truly scalable and flexible data centers that can power any number of vendor systems and business processes and workloads.

Read this whitepaper to learn how businesses take advantage of the power of the cloud to build strong analytically oriented teams, adopt new ways to use information and jump ahead of their competition.

We all know how major security incidents can affect a company's data, networks and corporate brand. We also know that sophisticated attacks, designed to gain continuous access to critical information or to cause damage in critical infrastructure, are becoming more severe, more frequent and more costly. Read this white paper "Responding to-and recovering from-sophisticated security attacks" to learn proactive steps that you can take now to help keep your organization safe: prioritize your business objectives and set your risk tolerance; protect your organization with a proactive security plan; prepare your response to the inevitable sophisticated attack and promote and support a culture of security awareness.

Virtualized infrastructure deployment has become an integral discussion within most dynamic IT environments, where shrinking budgets and overtaxed IT staff members are the norm, regardless of organizational size and complexity. A private cloud is a combination of virtualization and management software, physical servers, storage and networking hardware. Physical resources in the cloud are virtualized into pools of shared resources that IT can use to deliver capacity on demand to the business. The IBM Ready Pack for Cloud enables small and medium businesses (SMBs) to achieve operational efficiencies and faster time to market. This solution empowers small IT staff to rapidly deliver a virtualization infrastructure, manage multiple workloads across the cloud, and increase overall business efficiencies.

This paper looks at the requirements of the next generation of applications moving to the cloud. The paper discusses cloud customers' desire for a greater infrastructure choice and openness to hybrid infrastructures. The paper concluded shtt hybrid cloud infrastructures are inevitable, particularly for private environments. Hybrid clouds deliver higher values with high compute density, yielding strong cost efficiency for applicable workloads.

This IDC white paper discusses an important sea change happening in IT: the development of expert integrated systems.

Today's businesses need simpler more efficient and flexible computing models. The IBM PureSystems family is comprised of platform systems and infrastructure systems that include built-in "patterns of expertise" to address complex business and operational tasks for smarter computing.

This paper provides a pragmatic analysis about the undeniable importance of mission critical infrastructure, presenting IBM DS8870 as an assertive option to satisfy the needs of enterprise-class storage.

The skills and expertise required to stay on top of trends, industry best practices, and the latest technologies while juggling many other competing priorities can drain your IT resources. Read this Forrester Research Inc. report to learn how outsourcing your organization's business resiliency planning, strategy, and program design can be a highly cost effective, efficient option.

Live Date: Thursday 04/19/2012 11:00 AM Eastern/2:00 PM Pacific Organizations can face difficulties around team collaboration, with multi-platform development environments resulting in siloed teams using different tools across the entirety of the application lifecycle. How can your organization integrate teams across both distributed and mainframe environments? Meet the IBM application lifecycle management experts on Wednesday, April 4th to learn how you can take your organization's agility to the next level by unifying teams with a collaborative team infrastructure for all platforms. During this webcast, you will gain insights and hear real-world customer scenarios from IBM ALM thought leaders who are on the cutting edge of collaborative development and deployment technologies. The panel of experts, who span across strategy and product development, will review the capabilities of the IBM Jazz collaborative development environment, along with their experiences in helping IBM customers implement enterprise application lifecycle management