IBM's New Australia Development Laboratory

Post date: 
Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - 01:00

Headline

August 29th, 2006: IBM has consolidated its existing Australian development facilities to form the Australia Development Laboratory with more than 420 development and support staff.

The consolidation will provide Asia Pacific clients that are looking for cross brand IBM solutions with a one stop shop to innovate and grow their business. The Lab will act as a gateway for clients to tap into the know-how of hundreds of IBM software, services, systems and research labs around the world to bring IBM's deep business insights and technology experience of simplifying complex IT implementations to our clients. By connecting all of our labs, we can reuse assets and knowledge developed for one client or on one research or development project with hundreds of other clients around the world.

The Australia Development Laboratory will encompass IBM's existing development facilities in Canberra, the Gold Coast, Perth and Sydney. It will be led by Glenn Wightwick, newly appointed Lab Director. Wightwick is an IBM Distinguished Engineer, and is returning to Australia after a series of assignments in the USA and China over the last five years.

This is IBM's eighth major development announcement in the last twelve months. The company has also launched a Linux Technology Centre in Sao Paulo, Brazil; a Solutions and Technology Centre in Bangalore, India; High Performance On Demand Solutions Labs in India and China, and Systems and Technology laboratories in Shanghai, China and Moscow, Russia.

"As a global company, IBM needs to get access to the best software engineers and technical specialists, wherever they are in the world," said Wightwick. "Australia is a mature IT market with significant depth of skill in research, development and innovation. This new structure will bring IBM's Australian facilities in line with top labs around the world."

The Australia Development Laboratory builds on the success of IBM's research and development facilities across Asia Pacific. These centres have taken a unified approach where researchers are encouraged to collaborate across different product groups and areas of business.

"There are significant opportunities to more tightly integrate our development and better utilise resources across all these locations," said Wightwick. "I will be looking for skills and ideas that can be leveraged across all our development work around the country.

"The lab will also benefit from the close collaboration of developers and product support specialists. Our clients often identify problems or come up with suggestions that we can feed back into our product design."

"Having facilities in Canberra, the Gold Coast, Perth and Sydney gives us opportunities to build deeper ties with research centres of excellence around the country," he said. "There is a lot of interest in the academic community in areas such as web services, sensor networks, multi-core processors and security. IBM is also investing in research and development in these areas."

The Australia Development Laboratory will also give developers opportunities to get closer to clients and observe first hand how their ideas could be practically applied in the workplace.

"This allows us to solve customer problems much faster by coming up with new technologies, features or better ways of using our existing products," said Wightwick.

The Australia Development Laboratory combines IBM's existing local product development and support facilities including:

  • The Lotus Web Content Management Lab in Sydney, NSW, which develops and supports web content management systems for the IBM Lotus Domino and Java platforms.
  • The Tivoli Security Lab in the Gold Coast, Queensland, which works on access control and identity management systems and collaborates with local universities including the Griffith University, the Queensland University of Technology and the University of Queensland.
  • The OzLabs Linux Technology Centre in Canberra, ACT, which researches the use of open source and Linux technologies for IBM's System i, System p and blade servers and works with the Australian National University, National ICT Australia and the University of New South Wales.
  • The Australian Programming Centre in Perth, WA, which writes software and tools for IBM mainframe computers in collaboration with Edith Curtin University, Murdoch University and the University of Western Australia.
  • The Tivoli Netcool Development Lab in Perth, WA, which develops core technology for the Netcool service provider and business service assurance solutions.
  • WebSphere, Tivoli, Rational, DB2, Ascential and Informix product support teams in Sydney, NSW.

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