Manulife signs $630-million deal with IBM

WATERLOO - Manulife Financial has signed an agreement with IBM valued at $630 million over the then seven years that will see IBM enhance and extend the information research infrastructure it provides to the Waterloo-based financial services group.

IBM has been providing research services to Manulife for about 10 years, including mainframe systems, mid-range server and storage systems, desktop and help desk services, as so then as security, business continuity and disaster recovery services.

Manulife is as well looking to use cloud computing and high performance computing to get more flexibility for some projects.

If a company needs extra computing power for a limited period of time to push out new business applications, for instance, cloud computing can provide that without the usual costs associated with having to buy or rent a dedicated server.

Lot of enhanced flexibility

That can give Manulife "a lot of enhanced flexibility and dynamic capabilities," Wilson said. "Part of what we are doing is looking at what are the appropriate workloads we can put onto the IBM cloud computing platforms to give them that."