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IBM Cloud’s European expansion has taken another leap forward, this time via a deal with growing Slovakia-based insurance company NOVIS, IBM announced.

NOVIS adopted IBM Cloud “to help accelerate its international expansion, streamline business processes and gain efficiencies with innovation in a secured environment,” IBM said, noting NOVIS is running its IT systems on IBM Cloud in all branches across 10 European countries. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

The news came only a few weeks after IBM Cloud said it added six new European companies to its client list, with an Italian multimedia publishing company and an electronics distributor among those looking to IBM for better access to artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and analytics technologies. The six companies announced were Italy’s Gruppo 24 Ore, Spain’s Teckel Medical, The Netherlands’ Koopman Logistics, French bank Crédit Mutuel, the U.K.’s RS Components and Germany’s Osram AG.

NOVIS is already operating in Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. But the company launched operations in Italy during 2017 and then Iceland and Sweden in early 2018. As the company has grown and started to rapidly expand across Europe, it started looking for flexible IT infrastructure models, IBM said in a news release.

“New generations of clients using mobile technologies and social networks in their daily lives demand customer-focused enterprises, increased flexibility and optimized multi-channel interactions with minimized risk,” according to IBM. Now, “with plans to expand its insurance service to other countries and offer it worldwide, NOVIS needed a highly reliable, flexible and secured cloud infrastructure to grow with its business,” so it decided to “move fully” into IBM Cloud with VMware virtualization — all used as a service, IBM said.

“NOVIS is just one of the real examples of how IBM can help clients deploy their ideas to global markets with speed, scalability and elasticity,” Zuzana Kocmanikova, country general manager for IBM Czech Republic and Slovakia, said in the announcement.

“IBM Cloud is accelerating digital transformation across the global insurance industry by providing a secured platform for creating new business value” via services including AI, analytics and blockchain, IBM said. This announcement “builds on” IBM’s recent announcement that three of Germany’s major private health insurance companies joined IBM and Techniker Krankenkasse, the country’s largest statutory health insure, to offer electronic health records to 17.5 million clients on the IBM Cloud, IBM said.

IBM Cloud and AI/machine learning have been growing contributors to IBM revenue. Total cloud revenue over the last 12 months grew 23% to $18.5 billion, with $8.2 billion from hardware, software and services to “enable IBM clients to implement hybrid cloud solutions across public, private and multi-cloud environments, and $10.4 billion delivered as a service,” IBM said in reporting results for its second quarter (ended June 30).

In a separate announcement underscoring the growth of the IBM Watson AI platform, IBM Foundation and the National Center for Learning Disabilities on Aug. 16 said they are collaborating on a suite of classroom resources focused on supporting teachers who work with students with learning and attention issues.

“Teacher Advisor With Watson uses machine learning to correlate and understand nuances within a curated content collection of over 8,000 Open Educational Resources (OER) including vetted, quality lesson plans, student-facing activities and classroom strategies,” they said in a joint announcement.