Technology giant IBM announced on Monday that a new IT service center in the northern French town of Lille would create 700 new posts in the next five years. On its website, IBM France said the new center is expected to allow for the immediate recruitment of about 200 workers with backgrounds in computer science, engineering, mathematics and science. Located in the Euratechnologies zone, the new center aims at offering new services for digital business development by providing local clients with high value application development, application maintenance and systems integration services \"to address the increasing demand for flexible software capability to harness the benefits of emerging big data, cloud and mobile business technologies,\" it added. The value of the new investment was not revealed. IBM employs 9,700 people in France.