NYC Taps IBM for Data Center Consolidation and Cloud Computing Project

IBM Corp. said it will run the first phase of a New York City project to modernize its IT infrastructure under the Citywide IT Infrastructure Services (CitiServ) program, initiated in March, 2010, to consolidate up to 50 separate agency data centers into one centrally managed facility.

The vendor initially is tasked with moving 14 city agency data centers to a cloud computing environment and updating older and incompatible technology, ultimately resulting in faster deployment of technology solutions, lower energy consumption and stepped up security.

Officials believe that the CitiServ project will save up to $100 million over five years and improve the technological capabilities of the 100,000 workers that access the city’s data centers.

"IBM's work with New York represents a growing trend among local and federal government IT organizations that are looking to cloud computing and data center consolidation as a means to improve the way citizen services are delivered," said Bridget van Kralingen, IBM general manager.

"By modernizing technology infrastructure, government organizations are able to speed the deployment of new technologies, reduce energy and operating costs, increase security, and better understand their data in order to expedite benefits tracking, root out waste and provide transparency to the public on performance," she said.

The vendor said that first it will tackle streamlining the help desk, hosting, storage, email, virtualization and network of a number of city departments.

New York City kicked off the project last October by signing a one-off, consolidated licensing deal with Microsoft Corp. to provide it with cloud-based applications and services, a transaction officials estimated will save the city some $50 million over the next five years.