IBM today announced that the analyst firm Gartner, Inc. has ranked IBM in the "Leaders" quadrant in its Magic Quadrant evaluation of Storage Services vendors because of the company's ability to execute and of its 'vision complexity'. According to Gartner, Inc., "Leaders are performing well today, have a clear vision of market direction and are actively building competencies to sustain their leadership position in the market."

"IBM has been aggressively delivering storage services to clients globally to help them innovate, and we believe Gartner's recognition is testament to the rewards of collaborative innovation," said Paul Fried, vice-president for Storage and Data Services, IBM Global Technology Services. "By helping clients more efficiently store, manage and understand, and leverage data, we can help free them to innovate across their business. We will be relentless in pursuing that vision in the days ahead."

In March 2006, IBM Global Technology Services (GTS) began realigning its services to reflect service product lines, introducing business continuity and recovery services, infrastructure and system management services, networking services, technical-support services and IT education, and managed services.

The latest achievement of IBM Global Services was the agreement signed with Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and, according to the terms of the contract, IBM will provide net-centric collaboration services for the sum of $17 million. It appears that this is part of DISA's Net-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES) strategy project to provide one service for collaboration that can be used by personnel across the DoD.

These services are considered to enable real time information sharing through the use of an on-demand IT services structure, based on open standards and a secure hosted environment.

IBM will collaborate on this project with several other partners such as ServerVault, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), FGM, Inc., InstantTech Technologies, Polycom, Inc. and CISCO.

IBM is the largest storage services provider worldwide and has over 100 System Storage Solution Centers. On the other hand, IBM Global Technology Services uses methodologies and prior engagement experiences to offer solutions that help maximize operational effectiveness and gain competitive advantage while minimizing costs for clients.