IBM to beef up Taiwan design centre

IBM WILL BE EXPANDING its Taiwan hardware design center, mainly because its employees just work so damn hard, apparently.

The Taiwan Systems and Technology Laboratory (TSTL), which in 2004 was hardly even a dot on IBM’s map, has now purportedly become the Big Blue's main design centre in the Asian Pacific region.

Taking credit for various important IBM servers, and having developed over 30 new products in the past two years alone, TSTL has also won no less than two patents. All this has prompted the computing giant to decide it should probably invest a bit more in the place and hire some more engineering talent.

This means that, from next year, IBM plans to double the number of workers at the centre to 400 souls, up from the 200 who currently toil away there building Blade Center servers, Data Power products, single socket tower/rack systems, retail store kiosks and digital cash registers.

With all that extra hard work for less pay going on, IBM is sure it now has a good shot at making a major impact in the server space for emerging markets. TSTL, for instance, has already come out with the cheap X3100 tower and X3610 rack servers, already being offloaded to the third world as we type. µ

L'Inq
PC WORLD