IBM has opened a new Africa Innovation Center in Cape Town to foster the development of information technology and business skills and to expand its customer and business partner ecosystem in the region. The IBM Africa Innovation Center in Cape Town will provide local customers, business partners, start-up companies, ISVs, IT professionals, and the academic community with access to training workshops, consulting services, a broad technical infrastructure, as well as hands-on assistance to help solve business challenges and bring new technologies to market.

The center supports IBM's efforts to help expand the growing local IT ecosystem and is a key addition to IBM's $120 million, 2-year market expansion investment in sub-Saharan Africa. As the second IBM Africa Innovation Center established in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Cape Town center will help connect businesses and academics with the Johannesburg center, which opened last year, and additional local IBM initiatives. The new center will support skills development by demonstrating and providing training and access to open standards-based and emerging technologies.

IBM has also seen substantial growth among South African IT professionals taking advantage of IBM developerWorks, the largest and most visited global site to gain technology skills. Over 10,600 unique South African developers have been visiting developerWorks each month in 2009, gaining access to software tools and code, IT standards and best practices, and skills training in technologies such as IBM and open source software, Linux, Java, XML and cloud computing.

Through its expansion efforts, IBM has grown its South African business partner community by 40% since the beginning of 2008. In Cape Town alone, 140 ISVs offer solutions that run on IBM software and hardware.

For more information about IBM's Innovation Centers, go here.