IBM announced yesterday as set of cloud services and offerings, called SmartCloud, to students and researchers at schools, colleges and universities.

By using SmartCloud, educational institutions will be able to leverage predictive analytics to get real-time insight on the performance of students. Schools can analyze their own data using tools running in the cloud to identify individuals with greatest propensity to succeed as well as at-risk students at an early stage.

Michael King, vice president, IBM Global Education Industry, said: “Cloud computing offers educational institutions the ability to transform learning processes to be more student-centered, as well as the potential to reduce costs through shared services. Our announcements today lay the groundwork for institutions, systems, and states to begin creating these integrated cloud services for their constituents.”

Students and educators also benefit from the cloud-based social networking tools and self-service reservation of and seamless access to virtual computer resources, both on campus and on the IBM public cloud.

For more information on SmartCloud visit: http://www.ibm.com/smartcloud