"The trend in the financial services and banking markets is towards flexible and resilient infrastructures to ease the manageability of a company's overall operations and free more IT dollars for use developing client-facing products and services," said Mark Greene, general manager, IBM Global Banking Industry. "With today's announcement of IBM's Systems Solutions for Branch Banking, IBM is providing financial customers with solutions to realize a competitive advantage in this fast-paced market."

Systems Solutions for Branch Banking will help retail banks ensure the branch channel remains a key contributor of business growth in the future even with the proliferation of remote channels such as internet and telephone banking. The new banking solutions will allow retail banking networks to expand while maintaining a high quality of service for their customers. Retail banks will be able to quickly access, maintain, and analyze customer data in branch offices without having to retrieve data across the network. The offering also includes IBM Director software for central office management of the infrastructure and software deployment.

This new IBM hosted client solution is based on VMware virtual infrastructure software to host multiple users of fully functional desktop environments on a single blade within IBM BladeCenter and leverages ClearCube client access technologies, which increases efficiencies such as utilization of computing resources and quicker deployment of new users.

Users connect to their desktop environments using ClearCube Grid Center software which dynamically allocates them to the appropriate computing resource. IT administrators can manage the blades through ClearCube Control Center, which provides health status and automated alerts through graphically configured agents.