IBM and Rittal forge strategic alliance for data centres

Rittal and IBM Resiliency Services have formed a strategic alliance that names Rittal as a preferred IBM partner and supplier for data centre projects with end-customers. The relationship encompasses all infrastructure solutions needed to establish a data centre, and spans the whole of Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Rittal is a leading global provider of IT infrastructure. The new strategic alliance makes it one of very few partners to collaborate on a regular basis with IBM Resiliency Services in designing, constructing and operating data centres. Rittal offers a wide range of infrastructure components, including racks, climate control solutions, power-supply equipment, monitoring systems, safety/security solutions, services, and the modular data centre system RiMatrix S. All these offerings will now play a key role in projects to create data centres for IBM’s customers. The partners hope to generate synergy by building a joint market presence and exploiting their complementary customer bases. While IBM is strongly positioned in the banking, insurance and public sectors, Rittal enjoys superior access to industrial customers.

IBM’s Resiliency Services conducts professional IT, data-centre and other audits against best-in-class definitions for parameters such as space requirements, physical configuration, energy efficiency, availability and performance. IBM’s portfolio includes servers, operating systems, software, and IT services. These can be combined with IT infrastructure components from Rittal to create scalable, end-to-end solutions that fulfil customer-specific requirements and meet extremely high security and quality standards.

"By harnessing the quality, reliability and efficiency of IT infrastructure products from Rittal, IBM can offer its customers data-centre solutions that meet the highest standards, including outstanding availability," explains Brian Farr, Director of Business Continuity and Resiliency Services for Europe at IBM Global Technology Services. Each partner is able to focus on their core competencies while leveraging the partnership to gain market traction.

"The alliance between IBM and Rittal creates the ideal basis for planning and executing customer projects rapidly and expertly – on an international scale. From end to end, including hardware, software and IT infrastructure," stresses Andreas Keiger, Executive Vice President for European Sales at Rittal. "This enables us to offer our customers the best possible support when addressing major trends such as big-data analytics. M2M communications and smart factories," he adds.

The partners are currently setting up dedicated project teams to coordinate activities and provide mutual support in the international marketplace. They plan to create a shared platform for components, customer-centric services, training modules and marketing campaigns. This partnership agreement builds on a close working relationship that goes back more than ten years: as an OEM partner, Rittal has already supplied IBM with more than 170,000 IT racks.

To launch the partnership, Rittal hosted a workshop in Herborn for senior IBM executives, global offering managers from USA and Europe, and senior Rittal executives. They were tasked with coordinating strategies and defining a detailed roadmap for rolling out the partnership in the various national markets. This included agreeing on a joint approach to target customers and large-scale international projects.