IBM announced the opening of a multi-million dollar, high-performance software and services laboratory in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The first of its kind on the continent, the High-Performance On Demand Solutions Lab (HiPODS) is designed to support the growth of business across the emerging markets of Latin America by finding answers to the most vexing business and technology questions. The Brazil lab joins a global grid of six specialized IBM facilities to deliver a growing range of software lab services, including the recently opened HiPODS labs in China and India, as well as Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The lab provides businesses access to servers, storage and, more importantly, high-value skills from IBM's top talent in Brazil and around the world, depending on the specific needs of the client. The IBM teams build custom solutions to drive automation, virtualization and standards into clients' business and IT infrastructures.

"We are bringing IBM's deepest software and consulting capabilities into the heart of our fast-growing client base in Brazil and to the accelerating economies across Latin America," said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of IBM Software, in attendance to open the lab. "This lab will help local clients by providing a network of worldwide high-value solutions to transform their businesses."

Additionally, IBM's six HiPODS labs act as a gateway for clients to tap into the know-how of tens of thousands of IBMers and Business Partners at hundreds of software, services and research labs around the world. The lab brings IBM's deep business insights, technology know-how and vast experience of simplifying complex IT implementations to clients.

The HiPODS lab is connected using a Global Innovation Grid. The grid allows IBM to create a project team in minutes, assign servers and storage for a project in less than an hour, dynamically provision software components, connect global talent pool teams through blogs and wikis and most importantly reuse assets developed for one client with hundreds of other global clients anywhere in the world.

This Global Innovation Grid creates a faster path to innovation for customers as it allows them to focus on implementing new technologies rather than worrying about the infrastructure challenges of major IT projects.

By design, lab collaboration extends and validates new technologies in real world usage, while customers gain access to proven innovations. For example, the HiPODS lab has developed a Web-based service for evaluating the performance of workloads based on service-oriented architecture (SOA) for common scenarios such as banking, travel booking and insurance claims handling. This HiPODS developed service is available in IBM's SOA Business Catalog, a single, comprehensive online directory of hundreds of reusable SOA assets from IBM and business partners. Providing the ability to take people-based processes and turn them into more flexible, reusable software components made possible by SOA becomes critical.

Customers can bring their applications to this dynamic infrastructure lab to validate their performance, scalability and solutions needs before deploying them in a business environment. The specialists at the HiPODS lab also work with customers to tune their software to facilitate optimal performance and to develop customized solutions. With a strong double-digit year-to-year revenue growth, IBM Brazil will have no shortage of customers to serve.

"With significant growth in the overall economy comes the need for sophisticated IT capabilities that can scale up to sustain rapidly expanding and shifting workloads," said Willy Chiu, vice president of high-performance on-demand solutions at IBM. "Through automation and virtualization, IBM HiPODS can help clients extend their IT performance by wringing the most out of their infrastructure, a critical foundation for growth. This new lab is essentially a gateway for Latin American clients to access the intellectual capital, business insight and real world experience of IBM's hundreds of software, services and research labs around the world."

"IBM's new Brazil HiPODS lab is a very encouraging development for Latin American technology and business overall," said Tarquinio Teles, CEO of Brazilian online game developer Hoplon Infotainment SA. "At Hoplon, we are going through a transformation right now from a regional independent game company to a global provider of environments for Massive Multi-Player Online Gaming. This means we have a two-fold challenge: for our TaikoDom sci-fi/space game to adapt to a diverse, global audience, and now for our own environment infrastructure to meet global scaling demands. On both counts, we will need the kind of specialized SOA insight and high performance testing that the IBM lab can provide."

IBM's six HiPODS Labs are located in Brazil (Sao Paolo), China (Beijing); India (Bangalore), Japan (Yamato); the United Kingdom (Hursley) and the United States (San Jose, Calif.). These labs are responsible for facilitating billions of transactions every day from the company's many high volume customer engagements. IBM is responsible for creating and managing some of the world's most complex Internet infrastructures for leading global companies.

IBM has a long history in the region. In 2005, IBM moved its Latin American headquarters from Miami to Sao Paulo. IBM Brazil, established in 1917, was IBM's first operation outside the United States.