Armonk, NY – IBM is increasing its footprint in China with three major deals as the global technology giant has been trying to turn around falling revenues there.

The company’s sales in China have reportedly declined 11 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, after tumbling 20 percent in the first three months of the year.

In the largest – and most surprising – deal, IBM has formed a partnership with Inspur Group Ltd. that calls for the Chinese company to install IBM’s database and WebSphere software on its mainframe computers.

The mainframes are reportedly the first ‘high-end’ servers to be wholly developed and produced by a Chinese company.

The partnership has raised some eyebrows as IBM and Inspur have maintained a serious rivalry since May when the Chinese company set out to lure IBM’s customers after a US media report was published claiming that Beijing was studying if domestic banks’ reliance on the US company’s technology threatened national security.

At the same time, IBM has said that Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China Ltd., the largest private insurer in the country, has implemented an IBM Software Defined Storage solution “to help it speed data collection from one month to one hour, dramatically improving its ability to meet new regulatory requirements such as the annual audit and industrial data analysis.”

According to a statement issued by IBM, “With the new virtualized storage environment, Ping An is able to aggregate its growing data volumes in one hour instead of one month and accomplish data migrations easily with just a few instructions. In addition, the solution has delivered fast service times for Ping An’s critical projects.”

IBM also announced that it’s also working with China Telecom Corp. in a three-year agreement to help small- and medium-sized businesses run cloud-based applications, which are stored on remote servers instead of on-site.

Working with China Telecom, IBM said it will “provide integrated and seamless management across all SAP architectures and delivery models so clients can migrate and integrate new applications on the cloud, while maintaining and operating current applications.”

Under the agreement, IBM and China Telecom will first focus on clients in the Guangdong province and then extend the project to such “key areas” as the Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, Beijing and Tianjin.

09/10/2014