Technology & IT | Friday 16 January, 2015 1:40 am |

IBM [NYSE: IBM] has announced the z13—one of the most sophisticated computer systems ever built. It delivers scale and economics together with real-time encryption and analytics to help meet the expectations of consumers for speed and safety for trillions of transactions in the mobile economy.

The z13 system culminates a $1 billion investment, five years of development, exploits the innovation of more than 500 new patents, and represents a collaboration with more than 60 clients – underscoring IBM’s singular commitment to providing higher-value, innovative technologies to clients.

The rapid growth of mobile applications has created consumers who expect mobile transactions to be fast and seamless – regardless of which mobile payment platform, retailer, or financial organization is providing the service. As a result, businesses are being forced to evaluate whether their IT infrastructures can support mobile applications that meet and exceed these consumer expectations -- or face the potential of losing clients to competing businesses.

“Every time a consumer makes a purchase or hits refresh on a smart phone, it can create a cascade of events on the back end of the computing environment. The z13 is designed to handle billions of transactions for the mobile economy. Only the IBM mainframe can put the power of the world's most secure datacenters in the palm of your hand," said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president, IBM Systems. "Consumers expect fast, easy and secure mobile transactions. The implication for business is the creation of a secure, high performance infrastructure with sophisticated analytics."

IBM's new mainframe provides unprecedented new capabilities, including:

z13 is the first system able to process 2.5 billion transactions a day - equivalent of 100 Cyber Mondays every day of the year. z13 transactions are persistent, protected and auditable from end-to-end, adding assurance as mobile transactions grow -- estimated to grow to 40 trillion mobile transactions per day by 2025. [1]
z13 is the first system to make practical real-time encryption of all mobile transactions at any scale. z13 speeds real-time encryption of mobile transactions to help protect the transaction data and ensure response times consistent with a positive customer experience. The system includes 500 new patents including cryptographic encryption technologies that enable more security features for mobile initiated transactions.
z13 is the first mainframe system with embedded analytics providing real-time insights on all transactions. This capability can help guarantee the ability of the client to run real-time fraud detection on 100 percent of their business transactions by delivering ‘on the fly’ analytic insights that are 17X faster than compared competitive systems at a fraction of the cost. [2]