The savings will derive mainly from internal departments moving from a capital expenditure to an operating expense model.

Big Blue's world-renowned research team is leading the way in the organisation with a private cloud environment that it uses to purchase computing products such as servers.

The computer giant's sales team uses its Blue Insight cloud environment that crunches basic data on clients and turns it into information that can be used to upsell products to customers.

"IBM expects this internal cloud to deliver new levels of business insight to our sales teams and developers so they can better meet the needs of our clients worldwide, in addition to being able to realise tens of millions of dollars in savings over five years," IBM global chief information officer Pat Toole said.

This covers "hardware, software and operational savings, as well as significant data centre footprint and energy cost savings".

The company said Blue Insight gathered information from nearly 100 data warehouses and data stores that add up to about 1 petabyte (1000TB).

According to IBM's Richard Cocchiara, its researchers have been using cloud computing for the past two years -- before it was in vogue.

Used equipment would be "recycled" to other departments and an internal cloud used to inform colleagues of units' availability.

Previously, to buy a server, IBM Research would have to spend the money to buy the unit then spend more to buy storage for it, and when the researchers were done the company would still own the server. "This cost time and money which could be saved. IBM Research decided take their resources and put them into a cloud so other departments could see what servers were freed up for use," Mr Cocchiara said.

Source:theaustralian