IBM News on Ulitzer

IBM says it’s been hired to build an e-government cloud for Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, the one-time capital of South Vietnam.

As a first step it’s supposed to consolidate all of the city government’s e-mail systems and web sites.

The work will apparently be done in collaboration with something called Quang Trung Software City (QTSC), which let IBM the contract. QTSC will evidently run the new data center.

IBM will call on the local resources it started establishing last year when it set up a cloud computing center in Vietnam located in both Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi.

IBM is also co-operating with the Vietnamese Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST) in setting up a Vietnam Information for Science and Technology Advance Innovation Portal (VIP), an open innovation pilot program that runs on a cloud infrastructure.

The new cloud is supposed to enable

’s People’s Committee to create a “one-stop solution,” replacing its previously discrete set of services, and increase access to government information.

As an odd example, IBM’s press release says that “human rights activists, journalists, dissidents and even average citizens are increasingly using web sites and wikis to track political campaign contributions, report on censorship and crackdowns and analyze data released by government whistleblowers or uploaded as anonymous leaks.”