MANILA, Philippines - Computing giant is opening its first “innovation center” in the Philippines next week, in a bid to help small and medium businesses (SMBs) better harness the power of technology for their products and in their operations.

IBM Philippines chief technologist Lope Doromal Jr. said the facility, located on the ground floor of the IBM building in the University of the Philippines-Ayala Land TechnoHub, sought to provide SMBs a venue to test their applications on various platforms and on different scales.

He said it was usually difficult for SMBs to see if their applications would work on different platforms—for example, Windows, Unix or Linux—as conducting such tests on their own required investments in both hardware and software.

“But it’s easy for IBM to enable that since our products cover all platforms. Without having to make their own investments, SMBs can test their applications on different platforms through the Innovation Center,” he said in an interview yesterday.

He said the IBM Innovation Center would also give SMBs a chance to see how their applications would function when rolled out to different numbers of users—from the hundreds to the thousands.

The Innovation Center will also be open to members of the academe.