International Business Machines Corp. and King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology announced a multi-year agreement to collaborate on advancing machine translation technologies, advancing intellectual property development and establishing a National Women Software Development Centre. Under terms of the agreement, KACST will purchase an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer to enable KACST scientists to perform complex simulations and computational modeling. This agreement is one of several joint research projects undertaken between KACST and IBM. IBM will provide education services to KACST researchers on the functionality and features of statistical machine translation technology which was invented by the IBM Research team. IBM's Research and Development team will build the machine translation system with the initial basic system capabilities of several million words that will form the basis of the translation learning process. During this stage of the project, the IBM team will design, construct, and test the machine translation application based on the existing IBM Translation Engine tool. As part of the collaboration, IBM will apply its patent and intellectual property management expertise to help KACST develop tools and processes to effectively turn its inventions into patents, manage its intellectual property portfolio and maximize opportunities for commercialization of its R&D breakthroughs in global markets. This IP management initiative supports KACST's overarching goal to foster a prosperous innovation culture and create a thriving business ecosystem based on innovation. Specifically, IBM's Intellectual Property and Licensing team will provide methodologies and guidelines for developing a patent filing and portfolio management strategy that is consistent with KACST's objectives.

International Business Machines Corp. and King Abdulaziz City for science and Technology will collaborate on establishing a national Software Development Center aimed at becoming a world-class organization with highly-skilled female specialists acting as a catalyst for the growth of the software development industry in the Kingdom, and delivering solutions to domestic and global clients. The Center will create a unique opportunity for female Saudi software professionals to grow their technical skills while providing high-quality services and products to local and global clients. The staff will benefit from a hands-on training environment as well as the opportunity to draw on best practices from IBM under the initial mentorship of accomplished IBM scientists.

International Business Machines Corp. announced the world's largest private cloud computing environment for business analytics, which will provide IBM sales teams and developers new levels of insight to better meet the needs of clients worldwide. The cloud will launch initially with more than a petabyte of data, the equivalent of more than 300 billion ATM transactions. The company also announced a new solution, the IBM Smart Analytics Cloud, for clients to build their own private cloud environments based on the same Cloud infrastructure that IBM is using internally. Internally called Blue Insight, the company's cloud environment democratizes information, providing access to a variety of client and market data regardless of where an employee sits in the company. It gathers information from nearly 100 different information warehouses and data stores, providing analytics on more than a petabyte (1,000 terabytes or 1,000,000 gigabytes) of data. By turning that data into insight for IBM's sales force and development communities, the company will be able to deliver more value in the solutions and services it offers to its clients. More than 200,000 IBMers will have access to the new system. Blue Insight will run on a System z10 mainframe computer with 48 processors (32 processors for production, 18 processors for development and test environments) and strong cryptography - capable of handling up to 10,000 secure transactions per second, with redundant backup support. The company's own Analytics Cloud deployment served as the template for this solution offering, which features: IBM services, IBM Cognos 8 BI, IBM System z.