Whirlpool turns to IBM Cloud with SoftLayer to conduct ecommerce, reduce costs, improve flexibility and speed processing time

ARMONK, N.Y., July 14, 2014 — (PRNewswire) —  Today IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced that Whirlpool Corporation, the world's leading manufacturer and marketer of major home appliances, is taking advantage of IBM Cloud to transition from an on-premise hosting environment to a globally integrated cloud model.

Manufacturers like Whirlpool understand that data is the next great natural resource and that cloud represents the next step in evolving its data management capabilities; not only for mining, protecting and securing it, but also for integrating existing and new services and workloads to drive new innovations and more easily control and manage where data and apps reside.

As the leading major global appliance company, Whirlpool Corporation needed a flexible and scalable environment to host its ecommerce platform and store and deploy large amounts of critical appliance and commercial data. Specifically, the manufacturer needed a globally integrated ecommerce platform that would allow it to segregate and manage workloads at the regional level. In addition, it needed to create enough capacity for log retention, maximize security information and event management and develop disaster recovery capabilities for its existing product lifecycle management landscape.

To fulfill Whirlpool's strategic vision of modernizing its hosting environment to streamline costs and improve efficiency, the organization chose IBM Cloud, coupled with AT&T Netbond and the SoftLayer infrastructure to provide a solution that offers a scalable service delivery platform that expands and contracts based on client demand. By using IBM Cloud capabilities, Whirlpool can provision its applications faster and increase flexibility to integrate managed and non-managed services with future workloads. As a result, the new model is expected to lower its IT costs, improve its market responsiveness, and enhanced user satisfaction and service-level agreement levels. 

"As a global organization that operates in almost every country in the world, we needed to find a way to grow our capacity to store and track business-critical data and address compliance activities to respond to market dynamics more quickly," said Whirlpool Vice President of IT Operations and Security Alan Douville. "Based on our longstanding relationship with IBM, IBM Cloud and SoftLayer Infrastructure served as an opportunity to continue to drive transformation within our business and migrate mission-critical workloads securely to a cloud environment and provide us with the flexibility to respond faster to issues that impact our business."

IBM Cloud Managed Services and AT&T NetBond^SM were the foundational elements for an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environment for Whirlpool. IBM also used the Cloud Strategy Framework to help Whirlpool assess its entire IaaS strategy.

As an extension of its work with IBM Cloud Managed Services, Whirlpool chose to deploy a SoftLayer Infrastructure on bare metal servers. Using SoftLayer has enabled Whirlpool to develop disaster recovery capabilities for a critical project lifecycle management application.

"Coupling our integrated approach and industry-specific expertise with solutions like IBM Cloud Managed Services and SoftLayer provide our clients with the means to quickly differentiate themselves in crowded and increasingly competitive markets," said IBM Cloud Services General Manger James Comfort. "Our ongoing work with Whirlpool is providing the company with robust scalability and enterprise-grade cloud capabilities that are best suited for its long-term requirements.

In addition to today's announcement with Whirlpool, IBM is also announcing that in the past year IBM has substantially grown its cloud portfolio, marked by the acquisition of SoftLayer.

About IBM Cloud Computing

IBM has helped more than 30,000 clients around the world with 40,000 industry experts. Since its acquisition in 2013, SoftLayer has served thousands of new cloud clients. Today, IBM has 100+ cloud SaaS solutions, thousands of experts with deep industry knowledge helping clients transform and a network of 40 data centers worldwide. Since 2007, IBM has invested more than $7 billion in 17 acquisitions including SoftLayer to accelerate its cloud initiatives and build a high value cloud portfolio. IBM holds 1,560 cloud patents focused on driving innovation. In fact, IBM for the 21st consecutive year topped the annual list of US patent leaders. IBM processes more than 5.5M client transactions daily through IBM's public cloud. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/cloud. Follow us on Twitter at @IBMcloud and on our blog at http://www.thoughtsoncloud.com. Join the conversation #ibmcloud.

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