IBM has announced the opening of its new Power Systems Development Laboratory in Taipei City, Taiwan. The lab will focus on designing new energy efficient technologies for the platform to help clients address this pressing issue.

"IBM is building this capability in Taiwan to serve the market opportunity for Power Systems in emerging markets and globally," said Tom Rosamilia, general manager, IBM Power and z Systems. "The new Power Systems Development Laboratory will extend IBM's leadership in systems expertise to allow us to continue to gain market share across the board."

The new lab is the latest major investment IBM has made in Power Systems, which continue to gain global market share. During the past four years alone IBM has invested $3.2 billion in Power Systems. In 2010, 29 percent of the IBM's systems revenue was driven in its Growth Markets Unit. In 2015 IBM expects that 40 percent of its total systems revenue will come from these growth markets.

Nearly 400 customers migrated from competitive systems to IBM Power Systems in the fourth quarter, including 235 from Oracle/Sun and 135 from HP. There were nearly 1,200 competitive displacements to IBM Power Systems from Oracle/Sun, HP and others throughout 2010.

According to IDC, IBM's Power Systems had 53.9 percent share of the worldwide UNIX server segment (by revenue) in Q4 2010, as IBM gained 5.9 points of share over competitors and led the second-place vendor in the quarter by more than 30 percent.

IBM's sustained, multi-billion dollar investments in Power Systems led to the introduction in 2010 of workload-optimized systems for the demands of emerging business models such as smart electrical grids, real-time analytics in financial markets and healthcare, mobile telecommunications, and smarter traffic systems.

At an event in Taipei City representatives from the Taiwan Ministry of Economic Affairs joined IBM clients and business partners from around the world to open the new laboratory. The new laboratory expands the mission of the Taiwan Systems and Technology Laboratory (TSTL) which is part of IBM's Greater China STG Development Lab, already a hub for global expertise in storage and other systems architectures. The new laboratory joins existing Power Systems development labs in Austin, Texas, Rochester, Minnesota, and Boblingen, Germany.

About IBM Power Systems

Watson, IBM's Jeopardy! playing system, which recently competed against, and beat, the greatest Jeopardy! champions, was built using IBM Power Systems. Watson represents a big step in shifting the way we look at computers from today's "calculators" to "machines that learn." IBM Research scientists built Watson, using IBM POWER7 technology, as a research effort to pursue the future of computing. With the unveiling of Watson, for the first time, a computing system analyzed natural language and other language complexities in which humans excel at understanding and computers previously could not. In the business world, IBM Power Systems are designed to manage the most demanding emerging applications including business analytics and new classes of transaction processing. The systems incorporate a number of industry-unique technologies for the specialized demands of new applications and services that rely on processing an enormous number of concurrent transactions and data while analyzing that information in real time. In addition, the new systems enable clients to manage current applications and services at less cost with technology breakthroughs in virtualization, energy savings, more cost-efficient use of memory, and better price performance.