The IBM Client Innovation Center expands into Brabant

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With the opening of its new location in Brainport Eindhoven, IBM Client Innovation Center (CIC) is ready to support the rapid, high-tech driven economic growth of the Brabant region and provide comprehensive cloud, AI, and data capabilities to companies in the area. It will bring the experience of high-tech IT with a start-up culture to Brabant. Brabant Development Agency (BOM) has been fundamental in introducing IBM CIC to the many educational, research, and enterprise networks offered in the dynamic and vibrant Brabant region.

IBM Client Innovation Center

The IBM Client Innovation Center (CIC) specializes in agile and creative software engineering, user experience and journey design, and cognitive and enterprise solutions for data, AI, and IT tech. As an entrepreneurial start-up within IBM, the CIC provides the best of both worlds: support from the world’s largest IT technology and consulting services company combined with a start-up culture and mentality. It will offer students a great place to start their technology career or develop their skills in new technologies via an internship. Part of our DNA is closely collaborating with educational institutions and sharing our technology and industry expertise.

In the Netherlands, IBM CIC started in Groningen in 2013 and has grown organically to 250 people in both Groningen and Amsterdam. IBM CIC is present in 16 other locations across Europe. The broad range of office locations enables our organization to meet the technical, language, time zone, and regulatory requirements of projects for international oriented clients, as well as local clients, that range from small scale startups to large multinational companies.

Our ambition is to support our clients to transform their business

IBM CIC’s mission is to support our clients in the transformation of their business through a combined expertise in design, software engineering, and analytics. With our agile way of working, we empower people to continuously challenge and improve what they know and how they work, enabling them to develop and build solutions that matter for users. Our teams utilize their full end-to-end delivery capabilities throughout the entire system development life cycle, from design, architecture, and continuous development to operations (DevOps) and life cycle management.

We make scalable, agile, and collaborative teams of young technology professionals available to our clients in the region, either on- or offsite, or a mixture thereof.

Some of our core and prioritized capabilities include taking agile/scrum to the next level by applying our IBM Garage methodology in combination with SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) to help customers step away from rigid processes and quickly deliver high quality solutions while retaining the utmost flexibility.

A second area of attention is using our cloud expertise for specific data engineering, such as Big Data, IoT, and cloud development architectures and frameworks. This includes unlocking the hidden relationships and insights buried in vast amounts of data, whether the data is structured, unstructured, audio, or visual. IBM CIC develops ways to ensure data from different sources work together to augment human abilities and decision making.

Furthermore, we provide the capability to support clients to automate repetitive tasks, starting with our Business Analysts who look for process improvements and followed by Developers who design, develop, and deploy solutions using a wide tool palette that includes RPA software AI tools and different programming languages.

Our comprehensive understanding of Angular and upcoming frameworks like React and Vue.js. enable us to apply holistic front-end technology to develop fast and responsive Single-Page applications. We combine that with our deep expert knowledge of a wide range of back-end technologies and languages, ranging from the more foundational Java and C#/.NET to Go and the rapidly growing Node.js/Typescript, as well as Structural Query Language (SQL) and databases.

Not an ordinary office

In line with its young and dynamic culture, IBM CIC’s new space in Eindhoven deliberately breaks away from a traditional office. It is based on collaborative working and the new reality of hybrid virtual, onsite, and offsite project teams. It is highly flexible, so it can expand depending on the needs of projects, clients, and employees.

IBM CIC was drawn to Eindhoven for three main reasons: clients, partners, and talent.

• Clients

Brabant in general and the Brainport region particularly, has a reputation for attracting high tech and innovative companies, leading to strong and collaborative networks for new technology innovation that is also the DNA of IBM. Many of these organizations are in highly complex niche industries where collaboration is vital for them to remain in a leading global position.

IBM CIC is ideally positioned to assist these companies, as well as other organizations located in the south of the Netherlands and Flanders. Our new office location will also facilitate face-to-face meetings easily and allow for proximity to our clients and company visits when the Covid situation allows this again.

• Partners

Brabant is the Netherlands’ innovation powerhouse, with over half of all Dutch patents coming from the region. And within Brabant, Eindhoven is a leading European hub for 4^th Industrial Revolution (4IR), in other words, AI, IoT, Big Data, and 5G. In fact, the European Patent Office shows innovations in 4IR technologies are accelerating rapidly, especially in Eindhoven which is the leading cluster in Europe for these technologies.

With its agile start-up culture, IBM CIC can assist organizations integrate 4IR into their processes, turning these buzzwords into reality that can make the difference in the overall success of a project.

• Talent

With the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and Fontys University of Applied Sciences, Eindhoven is home to world renowned research and education institutions that specialize in technology and ICT. Eindhoven attracts talent thanks to its central location and proximity to excellent Dutch, German, and Belgian universities, including Tilburg University, the Jheronimus Academy of Data Science (a unique Dutch science university), and the Avans University of Applied Sciences.

The talented people interested in studying and working in Eindhoven make this city an ideal location for IBM CIC. Our new office will be staffed by a mixture of senior and young professional software experts, growing over time with our clients and partners.

IBM CIC is looking forward to establishing a collaborative relationship with Eindhoven’s knowledge institutions by participating in the wide range of activities organized with our educational partners, from technology related events and conferences to workshops, guest lectures and offering internships to promising students.

Working with BOM

Based in Tilburg, the Brabant Development Agency (BOM) offers a comprehensive range of services and support. This includes BOM assisting new and existing foreign companies to optimally utilize the opportunities offered by Brabant as a business location. For IBM CIC, this involved providing assistance in finding the right office location, undertaking fact finding trips, as well as opening doors to established networks.

As Guido Leestemaker, Project Manager Foreign Investments at BOM explains “IBM CIC is already important in the Netherlands and many other countries around the world. As well as making large investments and being a major employer, the company is a frontrunner regarding digital services and developing new technologies. Their presence will stimulate and further initiate innovation in the ICT sector, spreading to all companies in the ecosystem that use these technologies. As BOM, we are proud that IBM has chosen to establish its new Client Innovation Center in our region and, along with our partners, we are happy to support IBM. We believe that Brabant’s large business network, talent availability, and technological capability will serve as an excellent steppingstone for IBM and their future ambitions.”

Find out more

Would you like to know more about IBM CIC in Eindhoven? Contact by email leofwin_visman@nl.ibm.com.

Alternatively, if you’re interested in working for IBM CIC, look at our job vacancies https://ibm.co/2UwPIOh

For more information on BOM, visit www.bom.nl