MANILA, Philippines - Technology giant IBM is projecting growth in the retail, manufacturing, energy and agribusiness sectors in southern Philippines as the company eyes to expand its presence outside the capital.

The company brought its road show to Cebu to introduce a new line of servers for companies as well as a renewed push for its Lotus Suite e-mail and collaboration platform.

Charis Fiel, IBM business manager for southern Philippines, said there is a huge potential in key sectors outside the capital.

“Aside from the major growth sectors, IBM also sees potential in the business process outsourcing [BPO] sector as well as education and we want to be part of that,” Fiel said during the IBM Tech Expo and Conference at the Waterfront Cebu City Hotel and Casino.

Held simultaneously was the Lotusphere conference in Cebu, where business unit executive for Southeast Asia, John Mullins, unveiled new features for the platform, including collaboration for mobile devices, an expanded cloud collaboration platform, new social software and unified communication technologies as well an improved consultancy services.

“We would like to offer Lotus not just a solution for companies with hundreds of thousands of employees but also for smaller companies,” Mullins said. “There is no company too big or too small for Lotus.”

The cloud collaboration allows Lotus users to upload an unlimited volume of work files online for sharing to selected users. This LotusLive function combines integrated e-mail, web conferencing, social networking and collaboration.

For as low as $3 per user per month, Lotus users are assured of greater capabilities and security for their work, Ling Jia Woei, Southeast Asian executive for Lotus Live.

“We bring the same security capabilities that we give to bank clients to our Cebu clients,” Ling said.

The company also unveiled its new Power7 server series which can handle the most complicated of work to real-time analytics. The new line also offered less capital cost, lower power consumption and more efficient use of server memory capabilities.

“Smarter solutions require smarter systems that can scale quickly and efficiently, optimize performance, flexibly adapt to changing requirements and demands, avoid downtime, save energy and automate management tasks,” power systems manager Tristan Ylagan said.

IBM’s new eX5 series was also launched to the southern Philippines market, a successor to the x86 line of servers which the company reported as having cornered 20% of the market in 2009.

The eX5 series expanded the capabilities of the x86 platform by offering six times the memory scalability and at a more cost-effective investment. The result is a system that reduces the number of server needs by half, cutting storage cost by almost 97% and slashing licensing fees by 50%.