IBM said Monday that six universities in Qatar, Japan and Sub-Saharan Africa have started using its Blue Cloud to advance research initiatives previously constrained by time, resources and maxed-out systems. It’s unclear exactly what IBM is getting out of it.

The Qatar Cloud Computing Initiative, the first cloud platform in the Middle East, is being driven by three universities led by Carnegie Mellon that are supposed to open their cloud infrastructure to local businesses and industries to find oil and gas.

It’s fitted with an Arabic language web search engine.

It is running algorithms that will now take minutes instead of days, lowering costs by giving local oil companies a more accurate view of new drilling efforts.

Meanwhile, an alliance of seven universities in Africa is working with IBM to build a cloud infrastructure and develop applications leveraging the Hadoop programming model, using IBM’s Cloud Computing Center as an incubator. IBM is partnering with rSmart to deploy Sakai, a Linux-based open source learning management mainframe system.

The goal of this HEALTH Alliance cloud solution is to migrate from the South Africa Cloud Computing Center to an on-site cloud hosted at one of the seven participating universities over time, establishing a showcase cloud computing solution aimed at educating the next generation of healthcare leaders and impacting the social outcome.

The universities involved are in Kenya, Ethiopia, the Congo, Tanzania and Uganda.

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