Nissay Information Technology and IBM Japan plan to jointly build a cloud-based development and test environment to create mission critical Web systems for Nippon Life Insurance (NISSAY). Based on IBM Power Systems running AIX with operational management software Tivoli Service Automation Manager, the project launched in May, with the test and development environment expected to go live in September.

The new development and test environment maximizes the benefits of NISSAY's existing resources, while allowing for flexible allocation of IT resources depending on development workload, IBM reports, noting that an average enterprise devotes up to 50 percent of its entire technology infrastructure to development and test -- but typically up to 90 percent of it remains idle. IBM says that taking advantage of cloud computing within development and testing environments can help reduce IT labor costs by 50 percent, improve quality, and drastically reduce time to market.

The new cloud environment will allow NISSAY developers to procure new test and development environments in hours -- a process that previously could take up to a month. To prevent any impact on ongoing development projects and maintain test quality, NISSAY will maintain a traditional test environment that allocates resources in a fixed format. The traditional test environment can be transformed to the cloud in the future.

IBM Power Systems can scale to virtualize 1,000 logical partitions, letting the cloud computing environment and traditional test environment co-exist, IBM notes, while IBM Tivoli Service Automation Manager delivers standard application and design templates, which lets users obtain necessary IT resources easily and flexibly.

For more information on IBM's cloud computing portfolio, research and labs, check out ibm.com/cloud.