By shifting focus away from IT infrastructure complexity and cost recovery, this new model aims to enable organizations to rapidly respond to changing business needs with fewer resources, reducing capital investments and development costs, speeding time to market for new products.

"It could change the way engineers get their job done," said Pat Toole, general manager, IBM Engineering & Technology Services.

For the first time, it combines immediate access to some of the world's foremost verification expertise, a secure collaborative infrastructure, and a variable, affordable per user/per month license structure that can be added on demand to accommodate fluctuating hardware and software needs.

The offering is being used at Technion Israel Institute of Technology. Students at the university's VLSI (very large system integration) design lab can securely sign in and gain access to this IBM Web portal, and once inside the portal, hosted in New Jersey, access tools that help them with the design of the chip and formal verification, the process of mathematically proving that every circuit in the chip, no matter how complicated, works according to its specifications.

"By exposing our faculty and students to new ways of doing engineering, the Technion has become the first academic institute worldwide which educates students with this model," said Dr. Ran Ginosar, head of the institute's VLSI department.