My first web site was started back in 1995 and was located at ibm.com/patrick (IBM was kind enough to maintain the link when I e-tired at the end of 2001). People often asked me how I was able to get a web address so close to the top of the company. The best answer I can offer is that back then people did not know much about the Internet and the web. We were all on a steep learning curve. Since I was out giving speeches about the Future of the Internet and people were calling my office asking how they could get copies of my slides it made sense to build a web site and make the materials publicly available. Walking the talk It was a policy that served me well for years to come.
In July of 2002 I moved ibm.com/patrick to my own personal web site at patrickweb.com. Beginning in 1997 I began to blog about various topics -- I called the postings "reflections". They remain here on patrickWeb. Initially the tool of choice for writing was Lotus Internotes to do the writing and posting but then I experimented with various new blogging tools that were springing up. In July 2003 I switched to Movable Type. I thought it was the ultimate but have now decided to change to WordPress. For my needs it is a clearly superior tool and will save me hours in what I do. As a reader you will not see much difference initially. As I gain expereince with WordPress I plan to integrate it more tightly with patrickWeb. As things unfold you will see a much richer archive with categories and tags, books recently read, better search, and an overall improved look and feel. I hope to have all this completed over the next month or so.
On infrequent occasions I have something to say about the technical aspects of patrickWeb. Most readers will not care about this but for those who do care, patrickWeb will continue to use the Atom protocol to publish the index of what I write. There is a debate in technical circles about what protocol to use -- RSS or Atom. For the most part the issues are technical. Both protocols accomplish the same thing -- they provide an index that allows blog reading software, such as Google Reader, to be able to display the date, title, category or categories, and the content of what I write. I believe that Atom is a better long term approach but I will continue to publish in both Atom and RSS.
For those readers who are interested in exactly where the new feeds are you can find them as follows...
Atom feed is at http://www.patrickweb.com/wordpress/feed/atom/ For those who read patrickWeb from the homepage no action is required and for those receiving the stories from Feedblitz via email there should be no interruption.
The months of January and February were busy ones at IBM with a flurry of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. See the list of the current press releases in the extended part of this posting and an index for prior months here. The major focus of the company is on a "smarter planet", but underlying that is IBM Research. Much of what happens in the lab finds it's way into the market as a solution to a problem.
One of the key problems facing all parts of the world today is the economical and clean production of energy. Solar energy in particular has seemed elusive for decades but progress is being made. In fact there may be breakthroughs on the horizon. IBM is not the first company you think of when it comes to solar energy -- unless you look at the key challenges at hand and compare them to the core skills IBM has in the areas of microprocessor technology, materials science and manufacturing. Just last month IBM announced it has built a solar cell that set a new world record for efficiency and holds potential for enabling solar cell technology to produce more energy at a lower cost. Comprised of copper (Cu), tin (Sn), zinc (Zn), sulfur (S), and/or selenium (Se), the cell's power conversion demonstrates an efficiency of 9.6 percent. That may not sound like much but it is 40 percent higher than what was previously possible.
"In a given hour, more energy from sunlight strikes the earth than the entire planet consumes in a year", says Dr. David Mitzi, who leads the team at IBM Research that developed the new solar cell. In spite of this, solar cells currently contribute less than 0.1 percent of the electricity supply. The issue is cost. If solar energy can achieve a cost per watt comparable to conventional electricity generation, the world will be a different place. It is one of the great challenges and IBM is laser focused on it.
At some point the technology IBM researchers have pioneered may end up on the surface of the shingles on our homes and the roof of our cars.
There is something about clouds that brings the term into our daily lives. We say "it is a cloudy day", or "there is not a cloud in the sky", or if we feel especially elated or happy we might say "I feel like I am on cloud nine". Nowadays many are talking about "cloud computing". Sometimes we just say something is "in the cloud". It means different things to different people.
In the early days of the Internet we thought of it as made up of three parts. First there was a discrete collection of specialized computers called routers which moved packets of ones and zeroes between origin and destination. Secondly was another set of computers called servers which contained emails and web pages, and finally the networking infrastructure including telephone wires, modems, and various networking devices such as hubs and switches that tied everything together. Users of the Internet today that are not aware of this technical history -- which is the vast majority of the world's billion + users -- know the Internet for it's most popular application, the World Wide Web. In a sense, the web is a "place" that contains all of the information and applications that we want to use.
In more recent years the larger web application providers, such as Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo!, and others have begun to refer to their infrastructure as "clouds". If you create a spreadsheet at Google Docs and then save it, where is it actually saved? In the Google "cloud". We don't know where it really is -- it is just "there" at docs.google.com --- in the "cloud". There are many millions of servers on the Internet but to most people there may as well just be one. That is the beauty of the Internet -- you don't have to know what the infrastructure is or how it works. But suppose the spreadsheet you create and save at Google Docs happens to be your personal financial plan with income, taxes, assets, liabilities and estate plans. Do you trust Google with this information? There are multiple dimensions to the question and answers. From my perspective it is important to compare the risk to that of keeping such data on your own computer. In short, I would say that the risk of your data getting compromised at Google is less than the risk of your hard drive crashing or having your laptop stolen at Laguardia Airport.
Consumer and enterprise interest in cloud computing is on the rise. As security and reliability guarantees of public cloud service providers improve, more businesses are turning to the cloud not only to optimize their own IT infrastructure and workloads but to improve efficiencies in their business models by better integrating employees with clients and suppliers. In January IBM announced the largest enterprise cloud computing deployment in history at Panasonic Corporation. The consumer electronics giant has begun a migration to IBM's LotusLive public cloud services. More than 100,000 employees in various departments will participate initially and the expand to more than 300,000 employees and external partners and suppliers.
The Panasonic users will work together across the Web as efficiently as if they were all down the hall. The company believes that the freedom and cost-efficiencies of the cloud are compelling and that the IBM cloud will provide the security, reliability and privacy they require. The users will get web conferencing, file sharing, instant messaging, project management and social networking for business communications between employees, partners and suppliers. Panasonic has made a strategic decision to unify its brands worldwide under the Panasonic name and the IBM cloud solution will allow the global effort to provide a competitive advantage by helping its multiple business units work together more efficiently.
Is cloud computing for businesses or for consumers? It is for people. Businesses do not buy from businesses. People in businesses buy from people in businesses. Clouds are all about making people more productive. Panasonic appears to be adopting this philosophy in a major way and setting a very good example which will surely be emulated.
IBM says that the hottest growth area for the company is analytics. Putting their money where their mouth is, IBM has has invested $12 billion in analytics since 2005 and one of the major focus areas of the analytics thrust is healthcare. The strategy may not only make money for IBM but likely will also save lives.
IBM has been collaborating with the Mayo Clinic for many years. The latest of many breakthroughs by the two is an important advance in the early detection of brain aneurysms -- a lethal condition that is not so uncommon. The technique they have devised combines the latest brain scan technology with analytics to catch a critical condition far sooner than previously possible. The joint project has examined more than 15 million images from thousands of patients.
Traditionally, a patient suspected of having a brain aneurysm due to a stroke or traumatic injury would undergo an invasive test using a catheter that injects dye into the body -- a technique which itself has non-trivial risks. The new IBM - Mayo process uses non-invasive MRI angiography to create "automatic reads" that run detection algorithms immediately following a scan.
The instant the MRI images are acquired, they are automatically routed to servers in the Mayo - IBM Medical Imaging Informatics Innovation Center where supercomputer algorithms analyze the images to locate and mark potential aneurysms so that specially trained radiologists can conduct a further and final analysis. The automated aneurysm detection can be done in three to five minutes -- a potentially life saving difference from the traditional approach.
The months of November and December were busy ones at IBM with a flurry of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. See the list of the current press releases in the extended part of this posting and an index for prior months here. As part of the major focus on a "smarter planet", IBM is heavily engaged in healthcare both as an information technology and business solutions company and also as an employer.
One project at IBM, announced in November, I found quite interesting. IBM scientists at the company's Zurich Research Laboratory have created a one-step point-of-care-diagnostic test, based on an innovative silicon chip, that requires a very small sample of blood, is significantly faster, portable, easy to use, and can test for many diseases, including one of the world's leading causes of death, cardiovascular disease. The quick results can provide a doctor with more time that could be the difference between life and death.
IBM has a track record of improving heatlhcare over many years but with the company's leadership in nanotechnology there are even more significant breakthroughs likely. The one-step point-of-care-diagnostic test uses a silicon chip roughly 3/4 of a square inch to analyze a tiny sample -- 2% of a drop -- and determine what "genetic markers" associated with a particular disease the patient may be carrying.
The new diagnostic test that uses capillary forces to analyze tiny blood samples The capillary action of the IBM chip is similar to what happens when dipping a paper towel in a cup of water - the microstructures in the paper fiber enable the towel to absorb the water. The tiny chip contains sets of micrometer wide channels where the test sample flows through in approximately 15 seconds, several times faster then traditional tests.
A company in Begium -- Coris BioConcept -- believes the microfluidic chip is the next step in the evolution of point of care devices and they are collaborating closely with with the scientists at IBM Research - Zurich to take the innovation to the next level. More details about the project are here.
In the old days, companies recorded their sales on punched cards and then sorted the cards to analyze sales by customer number, date, state, and department. It was rudimentary but amazing compared to what could be done by sorting paper invoices. Today, the more advanced companies utilize "analytics" to dig deep into the voluminous data that they capture about each sale and the relationship they have with their customers. If you buy a bag of Frito Lay chips at a local 7 Eleven store, the home office in Dallas knows about the chips purchase instantly -- and that is the trivial case.
Savvy retailers, using analytics, know when an online buyer makes a purchase and if they have been a customer for more than 24 months and if they have spent more than $1,000 year-to-date and their cumulative purchase returns have been less than $100 and the returns have been 85% due to an ordering error and they tend to buy premium brands and they use Prime shipping and they live in 12345 zip code and their likely income is more than $xx,xxx and they have written more than X product reviews, and they recently made an email inquiry about a certain product feature. The analytics results in them getting on a special list of customers who get special attention. In the case of a financial services company using analytics, they look at the number of visits you make to the web site and how many times you have a complaint about something and what the bottom line profitability of your relationship with them has been over the past xx months and that customer may end up on a list of "high maintenance" customers and not be eligible for certain offerings.
Some customers would prefer that such granularity of data not be available but most are delighted with the enhanced and personalized service that analytics makes possible.
I don't normally write much about political or geopolitical issues. Like all of us, I do have opinions but it has been my practice to stick to technology, music, Mozart, and motorcycles in the blog. However, I can not resist saying something about the attempted aviation attack of a few days ago. Should the government use analytics? It seems so basic. If an airline passenger who is on a watch list purchases a $2,800 one-way ticket with cash, is making an international flight and has no checked baggage, requests a window seat above the main fuel tank, and has been reported by a creditable source to an embassy as a possible radical, should that passenger show up on someones radar screen as a person deserving of special attention?
From an information technology perspective this would be a trivial utilization of analytics. Proposals to utilize analytics have been made in the past. Each time, the political process has stopped the proposal. Civil liberty concerns have prevailed. If the bomber had been successful would things have changed? History would say no. Businesses are getting smarter and smarter. Our government is spending more and more money. Is it getting smarter?
The months of August, September, and October were busy ones at IBM with a flurry of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. See the list of the current press releases here and an index for prior months here. In addition to the major focus on a "smarter planet", IBM is heavily engaged in healthcare both as an information technology and business solutions company but also as an employer..
In a bold move to cut healthcare costs, IBM plans to drop co-pays by employees when they visit their primary care physicians under the company's self-insured coverage. The idea is to save costs over time by encouraging people to go to primary-care doctors sooner in order to get earlier diagnoses that could save on expensive visits to specialists and emergency rooms later. The company is able to make this change because it pays for the health-care benefits, not insurance companies. With 115,000 U.S. employees, IBM spends about $1.3 billion a year on healthcare so it is highly motivated to launch new healthcare initiatives.
Approximately 50% of Americans (133 million) have some form of chronic medical condition. Most of these people are not actually disabled, but they absorb a large amount of the country's healthcare resources. The most common chronic conditions are high blood pressure, arthritis, respiratory diseases like emphysema, and high cholesterol. The projections are that the number of people with chronic conditions will continue to increase. Most of the people in this category are between the ages of 18 and 64 -- in other words they are people who are working.
By encouraging employees to consult with their primary-care physicians IBM hopes to drive down costs over time. The company does not require primary-physician referrals for employees to see specialists. The combination of these factors -- no co-pay for primary care and no approvals for specialists plus payments of up to $300 a year to employees for taking exercise classes or enrolling their children in online weight-monitoring programs to curb obesity -- makes IBM a trend setter. The benefits will surely flow to both employees and shareholders.
The month of July was another busy one at IBM with a flurry of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. See the list of press releases here and an index for prior months here. In addition to the major focus on a "smarter planet", IBM is investing in society. The company's social performance is right up there with it's financial performance.
Right after the fourth of July, IBM issued its annual Corporate Responsibility Report, detailing the company's social performance results and strategies in the areas of governance, supply chain, environment, community engagements, employment policies and practices, and public policy. The 40-page report features IBM's Corporate Service Corps, a program IBM characterizes as a corporate version of the Peace Corps with the goal of developing a next generation wave of IBM leaders while at the same time addressing critical societal challenges in emerging markets. The company is integrating business and social strategies to make significant and lasting impacts in communities. For example, in the Sichuan province in China, the area stricken by a powerful earthquake last year, teams of IBMers engaged in the relief and recovery effort using their technology skills. The development of the skills also presents economic opportunities for IBM so the corporate citizenship goes hand in hand with business.
The report also outlines how IBM is minimizing its environmental impact by developing innovative technologies to conserve more energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reusing and recycling IT equipment to reduce product waste, and utilizing environmentally preferable materials in its products and processes.
The company report describes how it provides employees with skills training, health and wellness programs, and opportunities to gain global experience. IBM also supports healthcare reform and has been advocating "Patient-Centered Medical Home" (PCMH), a model based on the concept of comprehensive primary care. I am enthusiastic about this initiative because it offers the chance to replace today's poorly coordinated, acute-focused, episodic care with coordinated, proactive, preventive, acute, chronic, long-term and end-of-life care. This approach is fundamental to the transformation of the U.S. healthcare system. Many believe this can be best accomplished by strengthening primary care. The "medical home" is an enhanced primary-care model that provides comprehensive and timely care and emphasizes the central role of teamwork and engagement by those receiving care.
The month of June was another busy one at IBM with a flurry of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. See the list of press releases here and an index for prior months here. A major focus area in addition to a "smarter planet" is is Cloud Computing. IBM introduced the industry's first set of commercial cloud services
and integrated products for the enterprise. This is an important and strategic move for the company. It reminds me of some disruptive times during my IBM career (hard to believe it began 42 years ago).
Disruption is usually associated with a technological shift but I have observed that the disruption is preceded by and accompanied by a "dissatisfier". We have seen this movie three times.
In the 1980's the dissatisfier was departments in enterprises that were dissatisfied with how long it took for the IT department to introduce new applications that addressed departmental needs. Departments started using spreadsheets on PC's, sometimes acquired by finding a way to bypass IT department approval. Then companies like Novell offered "server" PC's that allowed the spreadsheets to be centralized and shared by all the PC's. Departments sometimes did their own network wiring to install "local area networks". The IT department lost control. IBM was not the director of this movie and concentrated on defending the mainframe turf instead of embracing the disruption. The company was in the audience.
The second movie was in the mid 1990's. It was called the the World Wide Web -- a breakthrough application of the Internet. The dissatisfier was that there were many thousands of physicists in the world who wanted to gain access to a huge amount of data being created from particle physics experiments at CERN in Switzerland. The data was created in many different formats and the people wanting to use the data had many different kinds of computers. Enter Tim Berners-Lee with a new document format called HTML and an Internet protocol called HTTP. The result was any computer with a "browser" that could read HTML could get the data they wanted including multi-media. It was a major disruptive change to how all things IT worked. IBM did not sit in the audience for this movie. While Microsoft and Netscape (illegally driven out of business by Microsoft) were fighting over who had the best browser, IBM was making major investments behind the scenes to insure that all of it's hardware and software supported the Internet. In 1996 Lou Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM, introduced the term "e-Business". The company developed a layer of middleware called Webshphere that allowed enterprises to link all their applications to the web. This movie made $billions. There is much more to the story than summarized in this short paragraph. Take a look at Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround by Lou Gerstner and Net Attitude by yours truly (now available to read free on the web).
The current movie is about Cloud Computing. IBM is planning for a repeat of the success it had with e-business. This time the dissatisfier is that IT applications have become too too costly and too difficult to use. A good example is Microsoft Office. I call it the "global IT tax". GE decided to confront this by going to cloud computing with Zoho.com. While Google, Zoho, Microsoft, Amazon and countless others are waging "cloud wars" over the consumer, IBM is behind the scenes again this time building a range of cloud offerings for the enterprise -- cloud tools for developers, public clouds to enable more efficient offerings for all of the enterprise's constituencies, private clouds to replace intranets, and research clouds for academia. The offerings announced in June are the tip of the iceberg. Stay tuned for much more from IBM in the clouds.
Much as client-server computing and the Internet transformed how people interact with other people and with data, cloud computing will transform these things yet again. With every computer in the world connected to every other computer through various clouds the potential to deliver data and collaborate around it will dwarf today's capabilities and at a lower unit cost. The data.gov project that Vivek Kundra talked about at the Wired Conference may be a model followed by enterprises. The idea is that when something happens -- a transaction, a widget gets ordered or shipped or had a service issue or a patient sees a doctor or has a procedure, the data will be in the cloud for others (who are authorized) to see it on a real-time basis. This is going to be an exciting movie and we will all be able to watch it in the clouds. (See other stories on cloud computing here at patrickWeb).
Epilogue: IBM has received considerable recognition for leadership with the World Community Grid. The grid can run virtual chemistry experiments to determine which of the millions of small molecules can attach to the influenza virus and inhibit it from spreading. There is the potential to make the world a better place because of this project. If you want to donate your surplus computer time to some of the great causes IBM is working on, take a look at worldcommunitygrid.org. Also, see IBM Happenings for May for more on the influenza project.
The month of May was another busy one at IBM with a flurry of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. See the list here and an index for prior months here. A major focus area in addition to a "smarter planet" is an effort using IBM's World Community Grid "virtual supercomputer" -- consisting of the spare computing power of more than a million personal computers around the world -- to allow laboratory tests on drug candidates for drug-resistant influenza strains and new strains, such as H1N1.
Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch will use the World Community Grid to identify the chemical compounds most likely to stop the spread of the influenza viruses and begin testing these under laboratory conditions. The computational work adds up to thousands of years of computer time which will be compressed into just months using the vast computing grid. As many as 10% of the drug candidates identified by calculations on the grid will hopefully show antiviral activity in the laboratory and move to clinical testing.
Influenza claims the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world each year and the current H1N1 virus outbreak is a reminder of how quickly influenza mutates and how easily new strains of the virus emerge. Traditional methods of flu vaccine development can not keep up with the high rate at which viruses change. The World Community Grid can run virtual chemistry experiments to determine which of the millions of small molecules can attach to the influenza virus and inhibit it from spreading. There is the potential to make the world a better place because of this project.
The month of April was another busy one at IBM with a flurry of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. See the list here and an index for prior months here. The major focus area continues to be a "smarter planet". (See Sam Palmisano's letter to investors for the full story on why the company is so optimistic). The Internet has made the world much smaller and "flatter” and now the next turn of the crank will make the world "smarter". IBM has a vision about introducing intelligence into the way the world actually works -- into the systems and processes that enable goods to be developed, manufactured, sold, bought, transported, and serviced.
In the "transportation" category, IBM sees increasing demand on rail systems in the U.S. and around the world that will dramatically strain existing rail infrastructure. IBM has released a new study, "The Smarter Railroad," that analyzes new approaches to modernize and build high-speed rail networks around the world. Findings from the report show that there are significant challenges including capacity and congestion; operational efficiency, reliability, safety and security. Otherwise things are fine!
The report highlights emerging technologies that will help rail companies instrument, analyze and manage rail networks and equipment in real-time. By putting sensors on train locomotives, freight and tank cars, at train stations and on the tracks, it is possible to build a new rail infrastructure that can meet dramatically increasing demand for rail transportation. Even meeting current demand is a challenge -- forty cents of every revenue dollar is spent maintaining the rail system. IBM plans to kindle collaboration among the many different stakeholders, including the rail companies, shippers, car owners, travel agents, municipalities, and the various intermodal carriers and customers. IBM is putting a lot of muscle behind the rail infrastructure and is getting good results already For example, Netherlands Railways, one of the busiest national railway networks in Europe, is using IBM software to manage more than 5,000 trains in the Netherlands through a network of 390 stations and 2,800 kilometers of track. The "smart" transportation system is improving the on-time performance for more than one million passengers per day by more accurately matching the number of trains in service to expected user traffic.
The month of March was a busy one at IBM with a flurry of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. See the list here and an index for prior months here. One of the major focus areas for IBM in 2009 will continue to be related to a "smarter planet". See Sam Palmisano's letter to investors for the full story on why the company is so optimistic. The Internet has made the world much smaller and "flatter” and now the next turn of the crank will make the world "smarter". IBM has a vision about introducing intelligence into the way the world actually works -- into the systems and processes that enable goods to be developed, manufactured, sold, bought, transported, and serviced.
IBM intends to help make business decision makers "smarter" too. The company has announced the creation of a new consulting organization that will focus on "advanced business analytics and business optimization". What a mouthful. IBM Business Analytics and Optimization Services will draw on the company’s deep expertise in vertical industries, mathematics and information management to help clients improve the speed and quality of business decisions. The service is designed to help decision makers understand the consequences of actions under consideration and actually see business outcomes that will result.
The IBM experts and their arsenal of tools are able to construct a digital model of the client's business or a functional aspect of their business. For example, some companies have handled their distribution channel in a certain way, well because they have always handled it that way. With a digital model of their distribution channel the IBM experts could then help clients simulate the many "what if" questions. What if we used trains instead of planes, company trucks instead of overnight delivery company trucks, a central distribution center or one in each region, or outsourced distribution centers managed by the overnight delivery companies. Etc. By connecting multiple digital models of the processes of a business, decision makers can see their next year's annual report in advance and in fact see hundreds of them each based on a different combination of "what ifs". While the planet is getting smarter -- with IBM's help -- business leaders can too.
The month of February was frigid in my part of the world but it was red hot at IBM. There was a flurry of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. See the list here and an index for prior months here. One of the major focus areas for IBM in 2009 will continue to be related to a "smarter planet". See Sam Palmisano's letter to investors for the full story on why the company is so optimistic.
The Internet has made the world much smaller and "flatter” and now the next turn of the crank will make the world "smarter". IBM is not using a metaphor -- they are not talking about the "knowledge economy" or the spread of education throughout the world. The company has a vision about introducing intelligence into the way the world actually works -- not into people but into the systems and processes that enable goods to be developed, manufactured, sold, bought, transported, and serviced.
The concept of making things smarter lies in pervasive instrumentation, sensors and powerful computing -- enabling the control of what things do and how they work. A simple example is a garage door sensor. If a bicycle is left on the driveway, the door senses that something is in the way and stops the door closing process. A more sophisticated example would be a node on the power grid sensing that power consumption is increasing in one location and decreasing in another. As a result the node switches the delivery of power from the surplus area to the area in need thereby avoiding a brownout. Likewise a smart web server might notice an increase in demand and shift workloads to idle servers and power down servers that are idle. A hospital gurney being transported down the hall is sensed and causes a message to be posted to the patient's electronic patient record and a message is sent to their primary care physician notifying the doctor that their patient has moved from the ER to a medical floor at the hospital.
The potential is boundless. Stockholm’s intelligent traffic system, created by IBM, has resulted in 20 percent less gridlock and a 12-percent drop in emissions by sensing how many vehicles are moving in a particular part of the city. In Norway IBM built a system for the country's largest food supplier that uses RFID technology to trace meat and poultry from the farm, through the supply chain, all the way to supermarket shelves. Smarter water? A collaboration between IBM and The Nature Conservancy is using computer modeling to simulate, monitor -- and potentially manage -- the behavior of river basins in the U.S., China, and Brazil.
There are countless projects of an urgent nature that can take advantage of IBM's Smarter Planet vision to make the world more instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent. The result will be improved productivity, efficiency, responsiveness, profitability and huge societal benefits.
IBM is well positioned to continue delivering on large complex projects around the world. The financial results from this should be significant. Take a look at the IBM 2008 Annual Report for more insight about what they are doing.
IBM unveils Tivoli Storage Manager 6
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 6 helps customers reduce operational
costs by improving scalability and addressing the performance of their
storage management assets. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26608.wss
IBM announces energy and environment validation program
IBM's new technical validation program helps clients easily identify IBM
Business Partner offerings that provide energy and environment benefits. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26604.wss
IBM to build 20 petaflop supercomputer
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has
selected IBM to design and build two new supercomputers at Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26599.wss
IBM delivers new talent management service
The Mid-Market Workforce Effectiveness service combines IBM's human
resource expertise with Lawson's Strategic Human Capital Management suite. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26586.wss
Suntel selects IBM Lotus Unified Communications
Suntel is deploying Lotus Notes and Domino and Lotus Sametime for unified
communications and collaboration and Lotus Symphony tools to its employees. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26607.wss
IBM unveils building blocks for 21st century infrastructure
The new products and services enable clients to use powerful computing
systems to manage and gain insight from an increasing number of things in
their physical infrastructure. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26550.wss
IBM advances enterprise cloud computing
IBM revealed a series of new products, services, clients and partnerships for
its Blue Cloud initiative – through which IBM is collaborating to develop and test
integrated cloud solutions for businesses. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26642.wss
IBM announces SPDE 3.0
IBM's Service Provider Delivery Environment (SPDE) Framework allows for the
creation, delivery and management of new telecommunications, digital media
and Internet-based services. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26658.wss
IBM to deliver software via cloud computing
IBM announced a new agreement with Amazon Web Services to deliver IBM software
to clients and developers via the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud environment http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26673.wss
IBM helps clients set CO2 reduction strategy
IBM's Strategic Carbon Management offering assists clients in developing
strategies to manage and reduce energy use and CO2 emissions. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26724.wss
IBM helps HFCL go green
The HFCL Group, a leading player in the telecom sector in India, has selected
IBM to implement innovative blade server technology to reduce its operational
costs and "Go Green". http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26730.wss
IBM, IBEC initiate rural broadband access
IBM and IBEC have begun to establish Broadband over Power Line networks
for nearly 200,000 rural customers in Alabama, Indiana, Michigan and Virginia. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26728.wss
IBM study recommends biopartnering
A survey by IBM and Silico Research reveals that if biopharmaceutical
companies fail to collaborate, they risk delays in the production of medicines,
devices and diagnostics. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26732.wss
University of Louisville supercomputer advances research
The University of Louisville's new IBM supercomputer will be used in areas
such as cancer research, materials science, atmospheric modeling
and bioinformatics. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26733.wss
IBM completes acquisition of ILOG
The ILOG Business Rule Management System, Optimization, Visualization, and Supply
Chain Management portfolios will build upon IBM software and BPM leadership. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26403.wss
IBM releases "Building Smarter Retail Systems" podcast
The latest episode of the "Building a Smarter Planet" podcast series addresses changes
retailers need to make in response to economic changes and empowered consumers. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26401.wss
Sara Lee, IBM sign services agreement
IBM has signed a seven-year agreement with Sara Lee Corporation to manage
and maintain pieces of the consumer products company's global back office operations. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26347.wss
IBM signs IT infrastructure deal with Kotak
IBM has signed a US$5 million IT services agreement with Kotak Mahindra Bank Limited
-- one of India's leading banking and financial services providers. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26404.wss
IBM reports 2008 fourth-quarter and full-year results
IBM announced fourth-quarter 2008 diluted earnings of $3.28 per share from
continuing operations compared with diluted earnings of $2.80 per share in the
fourth quarter of 2007, an increase of 17 percent as reported. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26510.wss
IBM announces LotusLive
IBM LotusLive, a cloud-based portfolio of social networking services, will serve
as a single destination for all IBM Lotus online collaboration tools. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26508.wss
IBM and SAP announce Alloy
IBM and SAP AG will release their first joint software product, called Alloy, which
connects IBM Lotus Notes software with SAP Business Suite. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26505.wss
IBM to acquire Outblaze's e-mail service assets
The asset acquisition will accelerate IBM's delivery of affordable,
Web-based e-mail services in a software-as-a-service model. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26486.wss
Korea Exchange Bank migrates to IBM System z10
KEB's migration to IBM System z10 enables the bank's credit card
business to create an advanced and smarter IT environment to improve
efficiency and customer service. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26490.wss
BNP Paribas, IBM sign services agreement
IBM and BNP Paribas announced an agreement for their existing joint
venture, BP2I, to support and manage the IT infrastructure operations
of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26516.wss
Hospitals choose IBM to build electronic medical records
Capella Healthcare, Memorial Hermann Hospital System, Trillium Health Centre
and Vanderbilt University Medical Center have turned to IBM to help build a smarter
healthcare system. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26807.wss
IBM joins project to build smart grid for electric cars
IBM has joined the EDISON research consortium, a Denmark-based collaborative
aimed at developing an intelligent infrastructure that will make possible the large
scale adoption of electric vehicles powered by sustainable energy. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26783.wss
IBM launches health record system for Guang Dong Hospital
IBM announced the launch of a new suite of healthcare information sharing and analytics
technologies at the Guang Dong Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26789.wss
IBM sheds light on the smart energy consumer
IBM Global Business Services' new report, "Lighting the Way: Understanding the smart
energy consumer," shows that consumers are willing to become more involved with
managing their energy use. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26782.wss
Scientists discover oldest words in the English language
Evolutionary language scientists from the University of Reading are using an IBM
supercomputer, known as ThamesBlue, to investigate how languages evolve.
Pro Bono Partnership recognizes IBM as outstanding volunteer
The Pro Bono award was bestowed upon IBM in recognition of free legal assistance
the company’s attorneys have provided to the Partnership’s clients. http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26747.wss
The month of January started out the new year with a flurry of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The list of announcements made during the month is here and the index for all months is here. One of the major focus areas for IBM in 2009 will continue to be related to clouds.
IBM revealed a comprehensive series of new products, services, clients and partnerships for its Blue Cloud initiative -- a collaborative approach the company is using to develop and test integrated cloud solutions for businesses. While Google, Apple, Microsoft and others battle it out for email and document cloud services for consumers -- much like the browser wars of the 1990's -- IBM is focusing on the enterprise. The company has a wide portfolio of cloud computing offerings for business, such as server capacity on demand, online data protection, Lotus e-mail and collaboration software, testing environments, and high performance computing for research and education. Customers in the pharmaceutical industry, for example, have selected IBM's Computing on Demand Cloud Services because it provides a highly secure and scalable storage and computing environment. Very large companies often want to build their own clouds and for them IBM offers Infrastructure Consulting Services for Cloud Computing and Infrastructure Strategy and Planning for Cloud Computing. IBM experts conduct workshops to help the customers develop clouds that are based on tried and true (and blue) solutions. I suppose many companies feel that building their clouds with "blue" will mean blue skies ahead for them.
The month of November was a busy month, as usual for IBM, filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The list of announcements made during the month is here. Included was the third annual "IBM Next Five in Five" -- a list of innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years. The Next Five in Five is based on market and societal trends expected to transform our lives, as well as innovations IBM is projecting will come from it’s research laboratories around the world.
These are some highlights of the five areas in which IBM sees our lives being impacted by technology innovations. For more, visit ibm.com.
Energy saving solar technology will be built into asphalt, paint and windows. There could be huge savings by having solar heat embedded in our sidewalks, driveways, siding, paint, rooftops, and windows. The cost of solar is going to drop with the creation of “thin-film” solar cells that can be 100 times thinner than today's materials. The new material can be “printed” and arranged on a flexible backing, suitable for not only the tops but also the sides of buildings.
What if you could foresee your health destiny and use that knowledge to modify your lifestyle? Our doctors will be able to provide a genetic map that tells you what health risks you are likely to face in your lifetime and the specific things you can do to prevent them, based on your specific DNA. Pharmaceutical companies will also be able to engineer new, more effective medications that are targeted for each of us as individual patients.
You will talk to the Web -- and the Web will talk back. You will be able to surf the web hands-free. Already, in parts of the world where the spoken word is more prominent than the written word in education, government and culture, “talking” to the Web is leapfrogging the PC because of the ubiquity of the mobile phone. We take voice for granted but soon we will just as easily use our voice to post to our blogs, scan and respond to e-mails and instant messages, and sort through the Web verbally to find what we are looking for and have the information read – as if you are having a conversation with the Web.
In the next five years, shoppers will increasingly rely on themselves - and the opinions of each other - in combination with technology "assistants" to make purchasing decisions rather than wait for help from in-store sales associates. Fitting rooms will be outfitted with digital shopping assistants - touch screen and voice activated kiosks that will allow you to choose clothing items and accessories to complement what you already selected. Once you make your selections, a sales associate is notified and will gather the items and bring them directly to you. You will also be able to snap photos of yourself and email or SMS them to your friends and family for the thumbs up -- or thumbs down. Shoppers can access product ratings and reviews from fellow consumers and will even be able to download money-saving coupons and instantly apply them to their purchases.
Forgetting will become a distant memory even as Information overload keeps you up at night. In the next five years, it will become much easier to remember what to buy at the grocery store, which errands need to be run, who you spoke with at a conference, where and when you agreed to meet a friend, or what product you saw advertised at the airport. Such details of everyday life will be recorded, stored, analyzed, and provided at the appropriate time and place by microphones and video cameras. Our mobile phones with GPS will remind us to pick up groceries or prescriptions if we are in the vicinity of the appropriate store. Strong privacy protection will have to be a key feature of these new technologies.
There is something about clouds that brings the term into our daily lives. We say "it is a cloudy day", or "there is not a cloud in the sky", or if we feel especially elated or happy we might say "I feel like I am on cloud nine". Nowadays many are talking about "cloud computing". Sometimes we just say something is "in the cloud". It means different things to different people. The goal of this story is to share what cloud computing means to me, personally. In a way it is simple, but in a way it is profound.
In the early days of the Internet we thought of it as made up of three parts. First there was a discrete collection of specialized computers called routers which moved packets of ones and zeroes between origin and destination. Secondly was another set of computers called servers which contained emails and web pages, and finally the networking infrastructure including telephone wires, modems, and various networking devices such as hubs and switches that loosely tied everything together. Users of the Internet today that are not aware of this technical history -- which is the vast majority of the world's billion + users -- know the Internet for it's most popular application, the World Wide Web. In a sense, the web is a "place" that contains all of the information and applications that we want to use.
In more recent years the larger web application providers, such as Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo!, and others have begun to refer to their infrastructure as "clouds". If you create a spreadsheet at Google Docs and then save it, where is it actually saved? In the Google "cloud". We don't know where it really is -- it is just "there" at http://docs.google.com --- in the "cloud". There are many millions of servers on the Internet but to most people there may as well just be one. That is the beauty of the Internet -- you don't have to know what the infrastructure is or how it works. But suppose the spreadsheet you create and save at Google Docs happens to be your personal financial plan with income, taxes, assets, liabilities and estate plans. Do you trust Google with this information? There are multiple dimensions to the question and answers. From my perspective it is important to compare the risk to that of keeping such data on your own computer.
I have been using IBM ThinkPads since 1992. They are very reliable -- but they do break. Hard drives are mechanical devices that fail; not often but they fail. How many people keep their data backed up? The minority. Does Google keep your data backed up? I completely trust them on this and have no doubt that their commitment and execution on backup is better than mine. The Google File System is very sophisticated and distributed. I don't know where my data is exactly but I know it is not at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California. In fact I am sure it is replicated around the world and combined on the fly as needed. From a security perspective there are some risks but Google does support document transfer using encryption and I suspect their security will get better and better over time. I suspect they have excellent programs to protect against employee intrusion and disaster recovery.According to Safeware Insurance Agency in Columbus, Ohio, more than 600,000 laptops are stolen or lost every year. I doubt if Google's computers will be lost or stolen.
I was skeptical about using Google's gmail in the beginning because I was hooked on the Outlook client. Not that I really liked Outlook but it has the look and feel of the desktop. Generally speaking Outlook performs well and you can work on things without waiting for the network. Gmail on the other hand is an online web application. The surprise to me has been how fast gmail performs -- especially when using the Google Chrome browser which executes the program instructions which are stored in the gmail webpage at lightning speed. At this point I would say not only does it perform as well as a desktop application but is actually faster for most of the things I tend to do -- like looking for something in my archive of more than 30,000 emails. What about when I am not connected to the Internet? There actually are ways to work offline but in reality, and considering the great gmail support in the iPhone, I am almost always connected. When it comes to email, I have moved to a cloud. My email is still john@patrickweb.com but my server forwards everything to my gmail account which where I access it.
Cloud computing has been around for years, we just didn't call it that. What has changed is that it has become easy. If I add an appointment or a contact to my iPhone, a few seconds later it is accessible at me.com/calendar or me.com/contacts. Likewise if I make a change at me.com, the change is reflected a few seconds later on my iPhone. Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange have had this synchronization capability for many years but it was Apple that has made it really simple. So simple, that they explain it simply by saying that your data is in the MobileMe cloud.
Spreadsheets, presentations, text documents, email, contacts, calendar -- all in the clouds. What is not in the cloud? There still remain, for the moment, some applications that cling to the Windows or Mac desktop. The biggest example is Quicken. It is a large and complex application with intense graphics and sophisticated interaction. Can it be done with javascript in the browser. like gmail? I have no doubt, but not so far. Quicken.com and mint.com and others are going after it but at this stage they have not been able to replicate what Quicken does on the desktop. There are other examples, such as Adobe Dreamweaver and other sophisticated tools, but ultimately everything that most of us need will be in the clouds.
Will everything be in the Google cloud? They make a compelling case, but I don't think so. There was a time when pundits said that IBM was taking over the world. Later the pundits said Microsoft was taking over the world. Now some say it will be Google. The world is a big place. There are billions of people out there and large numbers of clouds they will utilize. In fact more and more clouds are being formed. Startup companies these days do not bother with the details of their Internet infrastructure. Many of them use the Amazon cloud. The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (aka Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides "resizable" compute capacity in the cloud. For storage, many companies use the Amazon Simple Storage Service (aka Amazon S3) to enable storage in the cloud. The advent of cloud computing has made it possible for startup companies to get from new business idea to a full implementation of their idea in weeks instead of months.
Great for smaller companies but what about the really big companies like GE, Goldman Sachs, Walmart, Bank of America, BP, or Toyota? How about when they have a new web-based idea? How do they deploy it? Generally speaking it takes a lot of detailed planning. The project manager has to specify exactly what resource is needed -- a very specific computing capacity and well defined storage. In many cases it is difficult to be precise when an idea is new. They could use Google or Amazon but chances are they would prefer to have their own cloud. The large companies of the world have vast computing resources and skills and they also have a desire to keep things inside their own tent for various security and intellectual property reasons. Enter IBM and their new plans for "Blue Cloud".
"Blue Cloud" is a series of cloud computing offerings that will allow corporate data centers to operate more like the Internet startup companies by enabling computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than today's predominantly local machines or remote server farms. Blue Cloud technology will make it possible to have the computing resource and storage be specified in "virtual" terms and the cloud will do the provisioning in an automated manner using virtual resources. Underneath the cloud there are real resources but the cloud computing environment manages them in an autonomic way. That means that the cloud responds somewhat like the human body. When we get cold we shiver to warm up. When we get hot we sweat to cool down. In a similar fashion, the Blue Cloud will automatically add computing resources and storage on demand and when something breaks the cloud will provide alternate paths to keep things running. The project is based on open standards and open source software supported by IBM's hardware, software, and services businesses.
Blue Cloud will not replace the computing infrastructure of the world's enterprises any time soon but over time, this new approach to IT should dramatically reduce the complexity and costs of managing Internet projects. Ultimately, most computing may be done in the clouds and billions of people will be interacting with data and applications with handheld devices that will be more powerful than the supercomputers of just a few years ago.
The month of October was a busy one for IBM, filled as usual with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, and services, but the highlight for the quarter has been a speech by IBM Chairman Sam Palmisano in which he outlined "A smarter planet: the next leadership agenda" at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City on Nov. 6, 2008. Sam has lead a number of global conferences on innovation over the past five years to raise consciousness about how the world of business has been changing. At the Business Leadership Forum in St. Petersburg, Russia eighteen months ago he described how globalization has evolved -- international companies became multinational companies and have now become globally integrated companies. As IBM has preached and practiced, becoming a globally integrated enterprise means locating operations and functions anywhere in the world based on the right cost, the right skills, and the right business environment. (IBM now has more than 10,000 employees in China and more than 50,000 in India). But now the world has changed -- again -- and leaders of businesses and institutions everywhere have a unique opportunity to transform not just the way the world is but the way the world works.
Sam said that the crisis in our financial markets has "jolted us awake to the realities and dangers of highly complex global systems". He went on to describe how the movement of information, work and capital across developed and developing nations is just one aspect of global integration. New factors are entering the equation -- global climate change, environmental and geopolitical issues surrounding energy, and the global supply chains for food and medicine. "We are all now connected -- economically, technically and socially. But we're also learning that being connected is not sufficient. Yes, the world continues to get "flatter." And yes, it continues to get smaller and more interconnected". All this pales in comparison to something happening that holds even greater potential.
In a word, Sam says, "our planet is becoming smarter". What he means is the infusion of intelligence into the way the world works. This is being made possible as the world becomes densely populated with electronic chips. Not only a couple of billion people on the Internet, twice that with mobile phones but also tens of billions of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags will allow for much more automation and efficiency across entire ecosystems—supply-chains, healthcare networks, cities… even natural systems like rivers. As all of these become interconnected, they will be able to "talk" to one another and share information about where they are and what they are doing. An enormous amount of information will be created from cars, appliances, cameras, roadways, and pipelines. Sam painted a future where supercomputers will turn mountains of data into intelligence that can be "translated into action, making our systems, processes and infrastructures more efficient, more productive and responsive—in a word, smarter".
Not only will it be possible to implement a smarter interconnected world -- it will be essential to our survival. The growth of the past decade has caused a lot of inefficiencies to creep into our global systems. For example in electrical production, there are losses of electrical energy because the grids are not "smart" enough to avoid brownouts and to intelligently distribute excess energy where it is needed. Congested roadways in the U.S. cost $78 billion annually in wasted time and fuel. Consumer product and retail industries lose about $40 billion annually due to supply chain inefficiencies. Healthcare systems don't link diagnosis, to drug discovery, to healthcare delivery, to insurers, nor to patients. On top of that, the planet's water supply is drying up, one in five people lacks access to safe drinking water, and half the world's population does not have adequate sanitation.
Sam says that our financial markets problem will be analyzed for decades, but he says one thing is already clear. Financial institutions did a great job of spreading their risks around but they were not able to track what risks they actually had and quantify them. That uncertainly undermined confidence and things unraveled from there.
The good news is that all the challenges Sam described lend themselves to systems and technology solutions. There are many proof points already. Sam did not talk about IBM's role but he obviously did not pick examples that his competitors worked on. Stockholm's automated traffic system has resulted in 20 percent less traffic, a 12 percent drop in emissions and a reported 40,000 additional daily users of public transport. Intelligent oil field technologies increase both pump performance and well productivity—in a business where only 20-30 percent of available reserves are currently extracted. Smart food systems such as one now running in the Nordics use RFID technology to trace meat and poultry from the farm through the supply chain to supermarket shelves. ActiveCare Network monitors 2 million patients in 38 states for the proper delivery of injections and vaccines.
All of these projects and many more lead to competitiveness in a globally integrated economy. "From the boardroom to the kitchen table, people everywhere are ready, eager for a new way of doing things". Sam called it a "time for courage and vision, a period of opportunity". The New York Times summed up the speech as "IBM Has Tech Answer for Woes of Economy". Certainly a lot of opportunity for IBM but the speech also relates to the company's corporate responsibility.
The month of September was a month, as usual for IBM, filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The list of announcements made during the month is here. Included was the revelation that IBM scientists had unlocked the secret of the Kondo Effect. The scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Center in California have forged many breakthroughs over the years.
The Almaden center, which is set on 690 acres in the foothills above Silicon Valley, has a rich history of technical inventions including the disk storage drive, the relational database, and a bevy of innovations in nanotechnology and spintronics.
The latest breakthrough from Almaden's staff of 400 researchers and visiting staff is that they have unlocked the "Secret of the Kondo Effect". If you haven't heard of the Kondo effect, you are not alone. Scientists around the world have been studying the intriguing phenomenon in fundamental
physics for decades. The Kondo effect is one of the few examples in physics where many particles collectively behave as one object. Clear as mud? For me too, but discovery of how this works represents a major advance in the understanding of some fundamental physical phenomena and it may have a major impact on the development of future nanoscale magnetic devices. What that means is that our mobile phones will have more storage capacity than large computers do. Assuming that Internet bandwidth continues to expand it will mean that a vast amount of the world's data will be stored in clouds.
There are more than a billion Internet users in the world and tens of billions of web pages. Things were quite different in 1994 when I first showed the world wide web to the senior management team of IBM. Most of the web sites at that time were government or education related and my favorite back then was NASA which just recently celebrated it's 50th Anniversary.
Not sure who had the first web site but Internet domains began to be registered in 1985. IBM.com was #11 -- registered in March of 1986. NASA was not among the first 100 but when they launched their web site in the 1990's they had an awesome amount of content. In fact the United States government has set a good example of using the Internet effectively. (See "The Top Twenty Essential US Government Web Sites").
Unfortunately, there was no web when NASA started back in the 1950's but the anniversary web site has captured the history very well. An animated robot gives a brief intro on how to navigate the site and you get treated to a few tunes from the 1950s (such as "Tutti Frutti") and you can then move through the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s and enjoy a lot of multimedia.
Aside from many projects with the shuttle, Mars Rover, Phoenix Lander, the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, NanoSatellites, and countless other exciting areas of exploration, NASA is about to acquire a new supercomputer cluster. NASA partner IBM Corporation will be building an iDataPlex cluster system which will combine 1,024 Intel Xeon quad-core processors with Nasa's existing Discover computing cluster. The combined system will run at a top speed of 67 teraflops -- 67 trillion calculations per second. This will put it well up in the TOP500 List. The new iDataPlex system is made by supercomputer leader Big Blue but is also part of the company's "'Big Green" initiative. The supercomputer cluster will be running at 40 per cent of the power of predecessors but provide five times the computing power.
The new NASA/IBM system is called the "Discover Cluster" and will be used primarily for modeling of the 21st century climate and analyzing the effects of solar activity on the planet.
The month of August is a slow one in many parts of the business world -- but not at IBM. where the month was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The list of announcements made during the month is here. One of the many interesting projects involved helping preserve Alaskan language and culture. LitSite Alaska is bringing native language and stories to life using IBM technology which converts to text to audible speech.
The LitSite Alaska interactive Web site has a wealth of information, insights and stories about the history, diversity, culture and traditions of Alaskans and the IBM speech technology is bringing the stories life. A visitor could just read the stories but Alaskans believe that the ancient tradition of oral storytelling is more effective and it helps preserve native Alaskan language and culture. The oral tradition, an integral part of the lives of Alaska Natives, is in fact essential to learning and to passing on cultural knowledge and life skills. More than 1,000 pages of text have been enhanced with audio files using the IBM WebSphere Voice Server text-to-speech software. The audio files even include uncommon pronunciations of Alaskan native names and words such as KwaashKiKwaan, Tlingit, and Inupiaq. These words remind me of things I heard in Greenland.
There has been no summer slowdown at IBM where July brought a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The list of announcements made during the month is here. The company announced record second-quarter results with profits up 28 percent on $27 billion in revenue -- roughly $300 million per day! The stellar results came across the board from rom many product, service, software, and geographic areas. The company seems to be firing on all cylinders. SustainableBusiness.com placed IBM on their list of the top twenty sustainable stocks.
Cloud computing will become more and more pervasive in the news over the next few years. So far it has been mostly consumer facing activity such as what Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Apple, and others are doing, but behind the scenes IBM is investing heavily. The clouds that IBM operates are more enterprise, education, and research oriented. The company is
spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create two ultra-sophisticated data
centers that will power the cloud computing model that in turn will enable large institutions to offer their clouds to their customers. Another way to say it is that IBM is creating a cloud of clouds.
IBM is also providing advanced new server hardware to enable others to build clouds. Microsoft is among the first to implement IBM's iDataPlex system, a new category of server that brings supercomputing power to cloud environments. IBM is also going green -- the latest Supercomputing Green 500 List shows that 39 of the top 40 systems ranked on supercomputing energy efficiency
are IBM-based. The company is designing technologies to cut energy use in half by 2010, while increasing computing capacity by a factor of 10.
On the people front, IBM's new Corporate Service Corps program is getting some well deserved headlines. A software-development manager from IBM's Raleigh, North Caroline office spent July in Timisoara, Romania, where he helped a furniture manufacturer become more efficient and more computer-savvy -- offering his expertise for free. With Mr. Chakra in Timisoara were eight IBM colleagues from five countries. Each was assigned to help a different company or non-profit organization, sharing their experience and cultural backgrounds with the local staffs and one another. It is analogous to the Peace Corps. In the short term there is a lot of skills transfer but in the long term IBM gains a foothold in emerging markets and the assignees gain a tremendous breadth of experience which prepares them for key roles as the company continues to grow as a global leader.
I am sticking to my story -- the iPhone 3G is fantastic. There are some issues however. The iPhone is much more than a "cell phone" -- it is a platform. The six basic elements of the platform are the iPhone itself, the network (AT&T in the United States), iTunes, the "App Store", MobileMe and, most importantly, the applications.
Some are saying that since the new iPhone 2.0 software is available for the original iPhone that there is no need to upgrade to the iPhone 3G. It is true that there is no need to but there are a number of good reasons to. The new iPhone uses the new "new AT&T" 3G network which is claimed to be twice as fast -- as something. Speed claims are rarely delivered upon but no doubt that the 3G network is faster. The receiver in the iphone is also better even when communicating with an AT&T non-3G tower. I have noticed at least one bar improvement here at the lake where there is no 3G tower. The WiFi implementation is better too. Not sure if it is the hardware or software that is improved but it is much more reliable and doesn't get confused about whether to use the cellular signal or the WiFi signal. I am getting ahead of myself but one of the neatest new applications is TruPhone. TruPhone allows you to make a phone call from your iPhone via WiFi even if there is *no* tower of any kind. This happens. I was visiting friends in New Hampshire last weekend and we had brunch at a nice place in a remote area. There was no AT&T or roaming partner signal. None. No service. The restaurant, however, had a very nice free WiFi signal. With TruPhone you can make calls to anywhere in the world at a very low price -- pennies per minute. If you are calling another TruPhone user, it is free. I made some calls with it today and the quality was quite good.
There are other reasons to get the new iPhone. It is a bit thinner and more rounded and feels really nice to hold. It is a joy to use. The 3G has a real GPS receiver so when you use maps it is not an estimate of where you are based on cell phone tower triangulations -- it is using satellites to pinpoint exactly where you are. This opens up a slew of "location based" applications -- where is the nearest pizza place? What are the nearest geocaches? How do I get from where I am to wherever? The battery life is claimed to be better but I am not so sure of that. The iPhone has so much more to offer that I think the usage will be higher and maybe effective battery life will actually be less -- that is the case for me so far. Good idea to have a car charger on hand. One of the irritating things about the original iPhone is that you can't plug your favorite headset into it without a special adapter. The new iPhone accepts any headset and does so without any adapter. Bottom line, it is a really great device. There are many iPhone killers out there and more coming but I don't think they will match the overall experience of the Apple iPhone.
The network is another story and I have written about it in not so glowing terms in each iPhone update. I do think they are getting better. As I have always said, it depends on where you live. In the Northeast, Verizon has better coverage but AT&T is putting up new towers -- one just came online two miles from where I live in Connecticut. Naturally, major cities are covered. I also detect that AT&T customer service is really trying hard to satisfy their customers. The overall model of the industry is bad -- limited choice, get locked into two year contracts, and penalties if you want to move to something better.
iTunes continues to dominate online digital music sales but is facing more and more competition. I have been buying my music from Amazon. They have a nice downloader that puts the mp3 music directly into iTunes and there are no digital rights management restrictions. I like this because I can put purchased music on the iTrike. One of the other great applications on the iPhone is Pandora. This has become my music of choice and I play it through the Squeezebox. The Music Genome Project is awesome. If you love music, I highly recommend it.
iTunes is is integrated tightly (as all things Apple are) with the App Store. Both present easy ways to spend your money from your iPhone. I see this as a huge emerging trend. Call it m-Commerce (mobile commerce) if you want. While sitting in the dentist office awaiting your turn you can buy music and applications from your iPhone. An eBay application let's you spend your money -- or monitor your auctions-- there too. On launch day earlier this month there 500+ applications available for the iPhone. There will be many thousands of applications. So far, about 25% of them are free and supported by various flavors of advertising. You click to find the nearest pizza place and Apple gets a slice of the pie. Some are expensive but add huge value. I bought an aviation application for $69.99 that does everything a pilot can imagine. You can file flight plans with the FAA, check weather radar, airport runway lengths, pilot advisories, and much more. I am not a gamer but millions of people are and the iPhone accelerometer allows you to shake or wave the iPhone as inputs to the game. I have to admit that the Phone Saber is fun, albeit a bit geeky -- lets you take on Darth Vader. The impressive part to me is that the applications are stored in the iPhone but also in iTunes. When you sync you are syncing calendar, email, contacts, and the applications. When you click the App Store icon on the phone it tells you if any of your apps have an update available. When you do a search at the iTunes Store, the search results are organized by artists, albums, movies, etc. and applications.
On the flip side, organization is an issue. So far I have 55 applications. I expect to get many more. The human mind is amazing in terms of icon recognition. You just know that the Phone Saber is at the upper left of the fourth page of applications. But at some point it is overwhelming. I expect Apple or perhaps a third party developer will soon introduce an "app launcher" that allows you to tag an application as news, weather, financial, aviation, game, etc. and let you drill down to what you want.
Last, and I hope not least is MobileMe. Apple says it is the "Simple way to keep everything in sync". The vision is great -- your photos, contacts, email, and calendar are all pushed to your iPhone from the "Cloud". You can make a change on the iPhone and it shows up in Outlook or you can make a change in Outlook and it shows up in your iPhone. Those that work for companies that have Microsoft Exchange or IBM's Lotus Notes already have this kind of capability but there are millions of us who are "independent" and have our own mail server or use gmail, or Yahoo! or any of numerous other services. With MobileMe we can be like the "corporate" world but we can set our own policies and practices. We can have Exchange or Notes without Exchange or Notes. The cloud approach is clearly the next big thing (see prior stories on this and also by Irving), but Apple has stubbed their toe big time on this. There are numerous analysts, bloggers, and experts who have ripped them apart about the failings. As previously reported, I struggled with MobileMe the first few days but then it began to work properly for a few days albeit with some hiccups. Beginning this week it is not working properly. Calendar entries get duplicated, synchronization is sluggish or doesn't work at all at times. It is not like Apple to fail big time like this and I am sure they are scrambling to straighten things out.
I got an email from MobileMe@InsideApple.Apple.com the other day asking if I would be interested in a trial of MobileMe! Seems they didn't check their subscriber list first. The MobileMe web site says that "1% of MobileMe members have limited access to MobileMe Mail. Full service will be restored to these accounts on a rolling basis over the next few days". 99% and in a few days were good in the old days but not these days. I decided to try the online chat support to see if they could help resolve my problems. After sending my initial "instant message" I got a reply saying "A MobileMe Support Representative will be with you in approximately 26 minutes. We look forward to answering your questions". I got a reply while I had stepped out of the room for a minute and then had to start over and wait another 26 minutes. After 3 hours and 14 minutes the support rep said he had to escalate the problem to a specialist who would contact me by email. More than two days have gone by and I have had no email from Apple.
This all reminds me of the Fall of 1995 when we were preparing ibm.com to host the Olympic Games of 1996. It turned out to be the largest web site ever built. We had 54 outstanding engineers working on it and it turned out to be successful. Fortunately, we were able to convince the company to make a large investment in the infrastructure. I remember saying that "we don't how many people will come to the web site, we don't know when they will come, nor do we know what they will do when they get there". It was "trial by fire". That was 13 years ago. The lessons learned in 1995 served IBM well and it is now the largest web hosting company in the world. IBM doesn't always call it cloud computing, but they have built the largest clouds on Earth -- in the clouds. Apple has a lot to learn. I am confident they will. Their brand loyalty depends on it.
Thanks to Michael in Alameda, California for noticing that the June "IBM Happenings" had not been posted. A definite oops. The posting was ready to go a month ago but never got going. I'll blame it on summer books. The month started out with the Business Partner Leadership Conference in Los Angeles and then was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The list of announcements made during the month is here. One of the most interesting things IBM did in June was to release a Global CEO Study. Being the largest information technology solutions provider in the world, it is imperative for IBM to have a keen understanding of the priorities of the top management of it's clients. The idea is to stay ahead of the curve and have the skills and resources in place to meet upcoming demand. IBM sent senior people to interview 1,130 CEO's from 40 countries to capture insights on how the challenges CEO's face today will impact the future of business.
It is now more than 84 hours since I got my hands on the iPhone 3g. The bottom line is that the phone itself is a masterpiece -- really great. As expected, there are many applications available in the "app store" and many thousands more to come. That is the good news. The bad news is that apple.com is failing big time.
The activation and iTunes problems are well documented in the media but I am surprised that there is not more coverage of the MobileMe issues. MobileMe is a key part of Apple's strategy. It is basically a "cloud computing" offering that enables you to put all your email, contacts, calendar items, and data files at me.com which is Apple's name for their cloud. Once in the cloud, you can then synchronize everything with Outlook. If you make a change in Outlook it goes to the cloud and then down to your iPhone. If you make a change on your iPhone it goes up to the cloud and down to Outlook. If you go to a kiosk at the airport or use a computer at a friend's house and make a change, both your iPhone and Outlook are updated automatically.
I took the bait -- hook, line, and sinker. After installing the MobileMe software on both my iPhone and PC, I synchronized with iTunes. This resulted in all my contacts and calendar items being removed from the iPhone -- they would now be replaced by an update from the cloud. One big assumption -- the cloud (Apple servers) has to be working -- and it wasn't. This is the problem I anticipated in the last post. Apple does not have their act together in maintaining their cloud. I called support today and they said "MobileMe is not working -- all the servers are down". Not good. The great thing about clouds is that you do not have to worry about Windows, your varivous PC issues, etc., but the bad news is that you become totally dependent on the cloud provider -- in this case, Apple -- and they are not a proven player. At this point, all my data is in the cloud and none of it is on my iPhone.
This all reminds me of the Fall of 1995 when we were preparing ibm.com to host the Olympic Games of 1996. It turned out to be the largest web site ever built. We had 54 outstanding engineers working on it and it turned out to be successful. Fortunately, we were able to convince the company to make a large investment in the infrastructure. I remember saying that "we don't how many people will come to the web site, we don't know when they will come, nor do we know what they will do when they get there". Dave Grossman, of our team, called it "trial by fire". That was 13 years ago. The lessons learned in 1995 served IBM well and it is now the largest web hosting company in the world. Apple has a lot to learn.
The month started out with the Business Partner Leadership Conference in Los Angeles and then was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The list of announcements made during the month is here. One of the most interesting things IBM did in May was to release a Global CEO Study. Being the largest information technology solutions provider in the world, it is imperative for IBM to have a keen understanding of the priorities of the top management of it's clients. The idea is to stay ahead of the curve and have the skills and resources in place to meet upcoming demand. IBM sent senior people to interview 1,130 CEO's from 40 countries to capture insights on how the challenges CEO's face today will impact the future of business.
It was the largest study of chief executives ever conducted -- spanning 32 industries. This was not SurveyMonkey -- it was face-to-face interviews. The study revealed that 83 percent of CEO's expect substantial change in the future, and are optimistic they can successfully manage change. The catch is that the CEO's report that their ability to effectively manage change is increasing at a far slower pace. The gap between the rate of change and the skills available is growing. This is bad news in some respects, but certainly good news for IBM which increasingly gains it's revenue and profits by filling skill gaps for clients.
A somewhat surprising insight from the study is that CEO's believe that the most important changes are occurring within their existing customer base. Two kinds of customers are emerging. First is the ‘information omnivore’ who craves knowing everything about everything and spends a good portion of their time (maybe most of their time) online. The other customer is the ‘socially-minded’ customer. This type of person can't get enough of providing and retrieving information about where they are, where their friends are, what they are doing, what their favorite things are, and arranging a rendezvous in both virtual and real world places. The CEO's plan substantial increases in investments to reach both of these customer types. This spells opportunity for IBM. Take a look at a video clip with more insight about the CEO Study.
Speaking of CEO's, two of the technology industry's finest got together on stage at the Business Partner Leadership Conference in Los Angeles. Eric Schmidt of Google and Sam Palmisano of IBM have more in common than you might think. Eric cut his teeth on IBM's largest scientific computers and has been a devotee of advanced computing architecture throughout his career. Sam has a conviction about the role of information omnivores and social computing. The common ground is cloud computing. The two companies announced an initiative to promote new software development methods which will help students and researchers address the challenges of Internet-scale applications in the future. The goal is to improve computer science students’ knowledge of highly parallel computing practices. IBM and Google are teaming up to provide hardware, software and services to augment university curricula and expand research horizons. The University of Washington was the first to join the initiative but the program is spreading to other leading schools around the world. The project combines IBM’s historic strengths in scientific, business and secure-transaction computing with Google’s complementary expertise in Web computing and massively scaled clusters. It seems very likely that the IBM-Google collaboration will change the way large-scale computing is exploited over the years ahead. Here is a video clip of what Eric Schmidt had to say at the Los Angeles meeting.
The final speaker at IBM's Business Partner Leadership Conference in Los Angeles was Nick Donofrio, the company's Executive Vice President for Innovation and Technology. Always an emotional, enthusiastic and at times nostalgic speaker, little did the audience know that the next day IBM would announce that Nick will be retiring on October 1 after a fantastic career of forty-four years. I have no doubts that he will end up involved in many activities and will find that he may need to go back to work to regain some spare time.
One of Nick's many leadership roles at IBM has been with the Global Innovation Outlook program. One of the recent GIO events brought together a diverse group of global thought leaders for a series of brainstorming sessions about the future of innovation and economic advancement in Africa. One of the greatest needs identified was to provide access to capital and financing to more of the African population. It was clear that there could be significant growth and transformation if there was a more open, scalable, lower-cost microfinance hub serving the African continent.
IBM and CARE have announced plans to enable microfinance institutions to dramatically lower the costs of providing financial services to large populations in the region who have no access to banks. The goal of the new Africa Financial Grid is to help alleviate poverty and promote economic development in the Sub-Saharan Region. The two organizations plan to establish an Africa Financial Grid built around a shared services and infrastructure model designed to significantly reduce operating costs, streamline lending processes, scale rapidly, and integrate with other resources such as credit bureaus, financial institutions and international payment networks. The Grid will also eventually be able to link with mobile payment providers in Africa to enable customers to repay loans or transfer money via mobile phones. The project will initially target 11 countries with a combined population of more than 400 million people.
There are millions of people with business ideas and aptitudes but with incomes of less than $100 per month, it has been impossible to get financing. A small loan can make a big difference. For example, a loan of $50 enabled a mother of six to purchase fabric and sell embroidered products. Based on her success she was able to get subsequent loans and expand her business. Very small loans can have a big impact but it has been too costly for financial institutions to make the loans practical. The combination of technology and expertise that IBM and CARE bring to the table has the potential to change the model and have a huge impact. One more example of how the Internet continues to empower people.
The flight to Los Angeles last week was long but on schedule and it provided some time to make a dent in reading World Without End (sequel to The Pillars of the Earth) by Ken Follett on the Kindle. Holding the 10-once e-reader is a joy and the battery lasted throughout the six hour flight. The physical book -- 1,024 pages -- would not be a joy to hold for hours.
The purpose of the trip was to attend IBM's Business Partner Leadership Conference. The event was attended by roughly 1,000 business partners, IBM executives, members of the press, and information technology analysts. See "IBM Happenings - May 2008" for a list of some of the announcements made by IBM during the meeting. At the end of the first day was a special event at the University of California School of Cinematic Arts. The invitation only event included 100 or so analysts, members of the press, faculty members and students. IBM and USC had been holding discussions to map out a collaboration between some of the most creative minds in Hollywood with some of IBM's top scientists. Having known some of them for years I was really pleased with they selected. The moderator was Dr. Bill Pulleyblank, mathematician, computer scientist and predictive analysis expert. Bill is known for having managed a project in which a supercomputer named Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov in a six game rematch. The panelists were
all quite distinguished. Don Eigler, IBM Fellow, was the first ever to precisely manipulate individual atoms and spelling the word "I B M". Jeff Jonas, IBM Distinguished Engineer, expert in security and privacy, created much of the technology used in capturing criminals in Vegas casinos. Sharon Nunes, Head of the Energy and Environment business at IBM is a research expert in materials science and is working on numerous projects to save the environment. Last but not least was Ajay Royyuru, who leads IBM Research's computational biology team and IBM's liaison to the National Geographic Genographic project. Ajay participated on a past panel which I had the honor to moderate at Demo.
The breadth and depth of the panel could have kept the audience spellbound for quite a few hours. Will the future be like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Back to the Future, Incredible Journey or Star Wars? How can scientists help filmmakers create prescient depictions of the future?
Much of the discussion revolved around the merger of biology and systems. Some of the breakthroughs discussed included using nanotechnology to assure the availability of clean drinking water everywhere on the planet, self-healing spinal cords, and life span stretching well past the century mark? The human genome has been mapped but that is just the beginning. In effect the mapping provides the parts list of the human bodies. The next phase of research is to figure out what all those parts do and how they fit together. Not only will regenerating entire body parts be possible but embedded processors under our skin will make it possible to gain significant human augmentation of our capabilities. A project in Europe called Blue Brain is using IBM supercomputing technology to built a simulation model of the human brain. This is a very big undertaking but someday it could lead to curing some of the most dreaded diseases that afflict our societies.
Computer processing is already awesome but we haven't seen anything yet. A Mini Cooper has more computing power than Apollo 13 had. At the exponential pace of growth of computing capacity we may actually reach the Singularity in the next couple of decades.
Security and privacy are obviously crucial elements to the research agenda.
We will be able to have an embedded super-PDA that can record every conversation you hear or say during a lifetime. Existing databases make it possible to specifically identify a person by only knowing their zip date of birth and gender. So much for witness protection programs. The good news is that ubiquitous sensors can make the world is less dangerous place. Yes, the government can watch the people, but the people can watch the government too.
I think we are very fortunate that IBM focuses vast sums of money and thousands of top notch people on solving some of the tougher global problems. There is money in some of it and long term business value is created but along the way societies around the world benefit greatly from IBM's work toward the greater good. Take a look at the most recent report on this to get an idea.
As for film making, I learned a lot in talking with some graduate students at the reception. They are all hoping to be as successful as Steven Spielberg, and no doubt some will. The surprising thing I learned is that the best quality movies are still captured on cellulose acetate based film. It is rare these days to see a professional photographer use anything other than a digital camera and apparently with wide angle, high contrast movie making, the industry is not quite there. Consensus was that it would be all digital within five years. Computers already play a huge role (no pun intended) in film making either for augmentation of scenes or for creating the very characters of the movie.
It has been a busy week for me here in Los Angeles at the IBM Business Partner Leadership Conference learning about many new announcements from the company and getting to hear visionary guest speakers on a broad range of topics. More stories to come about this over the next few days and weeks. The whole month of April was filled with a slew of IBM announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The list of announcements made during the month is here.
The conference in Las Vegas this past week was not like the ones Thomas J. Watson used to hold in Endicott where all the blue suit white shirt male attendees would sing songs about IBM's future. The master of ceremonies for the opening morning was Drew Carey and the "dinner music" was by The B-52's -- the new waverock band not the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress. I don't think anyone wore a blue suit or a white shirt.
What attracted the 6,300 people to fly to Las Vegas and fill every hall, ballroom, salon, patio, and restaurant at the MGM Grand? IBM calls it "Smart SOA". I call it The Application Web.
Only the most brilliant technical people could come up with SOA as a name for something. Let's see, is it safe operating area,
School of the Americas, Skies of Arcadia (a Nintendo game), Society of Actuaries, state of the art, or the
Sarbanes-Oxley Act? Nope. The SOA that brought all these people together stands for "service oriented architecture". It is really important. The wikipedia has a comprehensive definition of SOA but basically it represents a new way for companies -- and hospitals, schools, and governments -- to enable their customers -- and suppliers, business partners, and employees -- to get things done on the web. Actually it is isn't new -- the idea has been around for decades -- but now it is really happening. It is so much a part of the vernacular at IBM that they just matter of factly talk about "so a".
In a nutshell, SOA will allow web sites to do much more than “click here to buy”. In fact web sites built with SOA will result in us standing in fewer lines in the physical world and have to endure fewer telephone call centers that want to control us. Fulfillment models at our favorite retailer’s web site will result in the staple goods we need just showing up outside the garage door when we need them. If businesses have the right attitude, SOA will enable them to get closer to the ultimate Internet -- to build a people-oriented and user-friendly experience that is tightly integrated with all the appropriate business processes of the company.
Over the last fifty years there has been an explosion of computer applications, but many of them were built in silos and were highly inflexible. In some cases companies thought decentralization was the answer so they allowed divisions and departments to do their own thing. The result was that many have a hodgepodge of incompatible systems that nobody is happy with. The web took things a big leap forward. At last there was a common way (the browser) for accessing and displaying information, even though the applications that run on the server -- that do the pricing, inventory lookups, shipping estimates, invoicing, etc. -- are still proprietary and usually tied to one particular IT vendor or system. The applications have also been very monolithic; i.e. in order to fulfill the expectations of customers on the web the application has to do the whole job. Soup to nuts; present the right price, confirm if the item is in stock, calculate shipping, and confirm the status of the order. Increasingly, customers want to get access directly into the supply chain and see exactly where their order stands. In short, applications have gotten larger and more complicated -- harder, not easier.
SOA -- arguably the biggest change in information technology in decades -- is poised to change the way applications are created and how they interoperate. Instead of building a monolithic application that takes a customer order, does credit checks, checks inventory, looks through the supply chain, arranges for payment, charges the customer, clears credit card transactions, etc., with SOA these various functions are built as separate "pieces". Think Legos. The individual programs are called "services" and they are called upon as needed. A sales tax calculation "service", for example, could be used by many different divisions of a company thereby eliminating redundancy. IBM has been practicing what it preaches in this regard. It has reduced the number of programs it uses to run the company from 16,000 to just a few thousand -- and declining.
The SOA services do not all have to be developed or acquired internally. Thanks to the Internet, services can be "rented" from others. For example, suppose that a company called American Specialties Inc. (ASI) specializes in selling American goods for delivery mostly outside of America. They want to create an application to sell their products on the web. The trickiest part of the application is determining the best way to ship the product to ensure it gets there when the customer wants it and at the lowest cost. ASI doesn't’t have the skills to write this particular part of the application and they haven’t bee able to find a vendor with a software package that can do it and which is compatible with the rest of ASI’s software.
It turns out that there is another company called Rates and Costs Inc. (RCI), which specializes in the calculation of optimum routes and the associated costs for shipment to places anywhere in the world. RCI offers the calculation as a service on the web and it is the exact function ASI needs to incorporate into their web application. Since RCI follows the SOA standards, ASI is able to see the specifications for RCI’s service – what inputs are required and what output does it produce. RCI could have created their calculation service using any IT platform they choose -- the standards assure that things can work together.
The programmer at ASI likes RCI’s program because it performs exactly the right function that ASI needs and the software has already been written and tested! ASI follows the SOA standards to incorporate RCI’s service into their web application. Whenever a user goes to ASI’s web page and needs shipment route and cost information, a link is made behind the scenes to RCI’s web server to get the information. ASI’s customers don’t know, nor will they care, that part of the job is being done by RCI’s server; not ASI’s server. ASI makes an arrangement to pay RCI each time one of ASI’s customers uses the RCI web service.
Creating programs by linking to other programs without regard to what programming language was used to create the others’ programs represents a whole new paradigm. It is one of the information technology industry’s holy grails. Standards organizations, such as Oasis, have been attempting for years to create a “neutral” programming environment. The UNIX vendors – HP, DEC, Sun, IBM, Data General, and others – formed various organizations, councils and consortia over the years attempting to bring things together. Progress was made but none of these initiatives achieved real openness and true compatibility across the information technology industry -- until SOA. It is not really new but it is time. Open Internet standards and SOA tools are making it happen.
SOA will make it possible for the web to evolve from a web of content to a web of content and applications. SOA will enable server-to-server interaction in addition to browser to server interactions. Servers will negotiate with other servers and even complete transactions by themselves with no direct human intervention. These interactions will replace the paper forms and faxes that flow back and forth from company to company today.
E-business evolved to on demand and on demand has evolved to business and IT "alignment". At this stage many enterprises have bought in to the concept but are struggling with how to get there. This is why many web sites don't fully meet our needs -- they are dependent on many independent applications that the enterprise has had for decades and so far have been unable to integrate them. SOA is the new model -- it offers the first comprehensive, standards based way to get the job done. Adoption of SOA will enable the interoperability within the many functions and departments of enterprises and between enterprises that has been a decades long dream. History has shown that adoption of standards leads to an explosion of usage and that will surely be the case with SOA. The SOA standards will enable entire industries to be brought together. Virtual corporations comprised of a federation of smaller ones will enable “hyper competition” on a global scale.
How does "Web 2.0" fit into all this? Like a ball and glove. Quite the hot topic in tech circles and among venture capitalists, Web 2.0 is basically a style, a model, an approach, and a philosophy wrapped together. It includes a "lightweight" programming model that is more like web page development than traditional programming. A key element of 2.0 is the blog feed -- a way to allow people to look at a web page but also subscribe to it. Another element is AJAX, a technique built on a collection of Internet standards that produces a rich user experience -- kayak.com is a good example -- with pages that don't "reload", they just change while you are looking at them. Another characteristic of Web 2.0 is that it is a perpetual beta -- users are treated as co-developers. At the conference, IBM announced WebSphere sMash which may turn out to be a really key tool for the evolution toward Web 3.0. Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow and CTO for IBM WebSphere, described a broad vision for how "smashups" will extend the web in a major way. The idea is to make it simple to combine content from multiple web sites. For example a travel agency may want to combine the best deals from airlines and hotels along with comments and discussion from tourists all in one "seamless" site. The smashup tool is based on a community project called "Project Zero" that has been underway for a number of months and is now ready to go mainstream.
All things considered, IBM really has it's act together with regard to SOA. Every software and services executive at the company is well versed on it and has it baked into their business and development plans. The promise is great and with tens of thousands of software engineers and top management support I think it is fair to expect IBM to continue to deliver on their vision. They have already made dozens of acquisitions to fill in the white spaces and customers are signing up and getting results. There were hundreds of customers and business partners there in Las Vegas to tell their success stories. Nothing is more creditable than having someone else tell your story for you.
Conferences, IBM, Internet Technology, On Demand, Travels, e-Business April 15, 2008 08:25 PM
Sunday, April 6, 2008
IBM Happenings: March 2008
The month of March was another busy one at IBM. The month was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The list of announcements made by IBM during the month is here. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here. A number of the announcements are related to datacenters. IBM builds state-of-the-art data centers around the world, not only for itself but for companies of all kinds. One of the most recent contracts was with Telecom Egypt. It will include the world's most sophisticated energy-efficient technologies.
The month of February was another busy one at IBM. There was a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. See the full list of announcements made by IBM during the month and the complete index from prior months. One announcement that I found particularly interesting was that IBM scientists -- in collaboration with the University of Regensburg in Germany -- were able to measure the force it takes to move individual atoms on a surface. This was the first time that this has ever been done.
Understanding the force necessary to move specific atoms on specific surfaces is one of the keys to designing and constructing the small structures that will enable future nanotechnologies. Building a steel or concrete bridge would be impossible without understanding the forces on the various structures -- likewise when building things at the atomic level. Miniaturizing storage and computing devices to the ultimate limit – the scale of just a few atoms – will require radically new designs and manufacturing methods and the breakthrough ability to measure the force it takes to move an atom will become a fundamental ingredient. Nanotechnology will be changing our lives in the years ahead by enabling vast amounts of personal information storage and incredible new capabilities in healthcare, and just about everything around us will contain amazing new materials
The month of January was a busy one at IBM. The month was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. I was particularly pleased to see the continued collaboration with the Mayo Clinic. They jointly established an imaging center aimed at advancing medical imaging technologies to improve the quality of patient care.
The list of announcements made by IBM during the month is here. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
The United States granted the first patent to Samuel Hopkins of Pittsford, Vermont in 1790. Mr. Hopkin's idea had to do with making potash which in turn was used in making glass and in various industrial processes.Two other major patents granted the same year were related to making candles and milling flour.
A mere 218 years later the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced that for the fifteenth consecutive year, IBM received more patents -- 3,125 -- than any other private sector organization in America. The patents were granted to more than 5,200 of the company's inventors around the world. In keeping with the "green" times, IBM and the World Business Council for sustainable Development, along with Nokia, Pitney Bowes, and Sony, have established the Eco-Patent Commons, committing dozens of innovative, environmentally responsible patents to the public domain. The Eco-Patent Commons is an initiative to create a collection of patents on technology that directly or indirectly protects the environment. The patents will be made available to anyone free of charge.
While IBM creates the most patents, it also gives away the most. Surely IBM will continue to invent things in IBM Research laboratories but in addition they are fostering "collaborative innovation". The idea is to form an industry-wide "patent commons" in which patents are used to spread new ideas more rapidly to both developers and users. Some of the most significant technological advances are based on open standards (in the public eye like open source software) and shared knowledge and experience. Probably the best example of this I can think of is the Internet. IBM's practice of giving away certain patents may lead to important breakthroughs as IBM challenges
other companies to follow suit in deploying their intellectual
property portfolios for more than just legal or financial self-interest.
The annual "IBM Next Five in Five" is a list of predicted innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years. The list is based on market and societal trends expected to transform our lives, as well as emerging technologies from IBM’s Labs around the world that could make these innovations possible. Following is a sampling of the five areas.
The press is covered with stories about all things "green". IBM believes the technology is actually going to make it easy to be green and save money in the process. A range of "smart energy" technologies will enable us to manage our personal "carbon footprint". As data begins to run through our home electrical system, appliances, air conditioners, lights, and computers, we will become connected to a "smart" electrical grid, making it possible to turn our appliances on and off using a web browser from a PC or cell phone. In addition to alerting you about leaving appliances on when they could be off, we will be able to establish rules to be followed to automatically conserve energy. Reports will show us electrical usage just like we track our cell phone minutes. Intelligent energy grids will also enable utilities to provide you with the option to use only green energy sources such as solar and wind.
The way we drive will be changing dramatically. In the next five years, IBM says our cars will connected to the roads we drive on and thereby we will be safer and remain out of traffic jams. The technology will keep traffic flowing smoothly, cut pollution, curb accidents, and make it easier and less stressful for us to get where we are going. Intelligent traffic systems will make real-time adjustments to traffic lights and divert traffic to alternate routes while our cars will communicate with each other and with sensors along the road -- allowing them to behave as if they have 'reflexes' so they can take preventive actions under dangerous conditions. When traffic is jammed up alternative routes will be activated.
Since we are what we eat, we should know what we eat. With foods being sourced across international borders, the need to know exactly what we eat has never been more important. According to IBM, in the next five years, new advancements in software and wireless radio sensor technologies will enable us to know the exact source and make-up of the food we buy -- the climate and soil the food was grown in, the pesticides and pollution it was exposed to, the energy consumed to create the product, and the temperature and air quality of the shipping containers it traveled in on the way to our dinner table.
In the next five years, IBM says our cell phones will become our wallets, ticket brokers, concierge, bank, shopping buddy, and tour guide. New technology will allow us to snap a picture of someone wearing an outfit we want and will automatically search the web to find the designer and the nearest shop that has the outfit in stock. We will then see what that outfit would look like on our personal avatar – a 3-D representation of our self on our phone, and ask our friends to check it out online and give their opinion. When we turn on our phone in a city we are visiting, it will automatically provide us with local entertainment options, activities, and dining options that match our preferences -- and then make reservations and purchase tickets for us.
Perhaps the most important area where IBM sees major advances is healthcare. Doctors will get enhanced “super-senses” to better diagnose and treat us. In the next five years, our doctor will be able to see, hear and understand our medical records in entirely new ways. In effect, doctor’s will gain superpowers – technologies will allow them to gain x-ray like vision to view medical images and super sensitive hearing to find the tiniest audio clue in our heart beat. Our avatar will allow doctors to click on a part of our body and then visualize the relevant information for that part of us. The hospital system will then be able to compare those visual and audio clues to thousands of other anonymous patient records and be able to be much more precise in diagnosing us and providing us with a personalized treatment plan.
Some of the innovations IBM is predicting may seem like a stretch but the basics of all of them are already in place. If we were to step back five years it is likely most of us would not have foreseen how we would be doing on the Internet today.
The month of November was one of the fastest paces for news that I have seen since "IBM Happenings" blog started in June 2004. The month was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. One of the most interesting announcements to me was that IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer sprinted to a new world record and continued its four-year domination of the official TOP500 Supercomputer Sites list.
Here are all the other announcements made by IBM during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
One of the many innovations Sam Palmisano has spearheaded at IBM is the idea of reaching out to "alumni". The first initiative was a few years ago when he hosted a reception for a group of former executives of the company. A few were retired but most were in senior positions in other companies. That was just the beginning and now the idea of reaching out has been expanded -- big time. The number of past and present IBMers is probably close to a million people. Establishing communications with such a huge base can be nothing but a good thing for the company.
When I left engineering school and joined IBM in 1967, it was common to look for a job at a company and expect to stay there your entire career. Nobody thinks that way anymore. If you tell someone you were with a company for decades, they might ask "what's the matter, couldn't you find any other jobs?". Another change is that in the old days if someone left the company they were considered a traitor and barred from coming back. Today, there are many executives that left the company at some point, got some experience at one or more other companies, and then brought that experience back into IBM. Some have come and gone multiple times. The turnover has strengthened the company.
And now we have social networks. In the early stages there was a perception that social networking meant eleven year-old girls on MySpace. Now businesses are realizing that it is more likely forty or fifty year-old business people on Facebook and Xing and LinkedIn and Plaxo Pulse. The Internet has enabled everyone to be connected to everyone. Whether it is reading blogs, posting to wikis, updating status on Facebook, or making new connections through viral invitations, it is clear that a big company like IBM has a lot to gain by "connecting" past, present, and future IBMers to each other and with the company. IBM calls it "the greaterIBM connection". On Monday evening the company hosted a greaterIBM reception at the Metrazur at Grand Central Station in New York. More than four hundred attended. It was good to reconnect with some colleagues I had not seen for quite a few years.
Will social networking payoff in business terms? Nobody knows for sure but in my opinion it is certain -- as soon as we see the New York Times run a front page story that social networking is a fad, in trouble or peaking out we will have confirmation that success is a sure thing. A short term inhibitor is that there are so many different social networks. As web standards evolve I am confident that we will have a world where people will create one profile and then be able to decide which part of their profile is accessible in which networks.
IBM sees the potential and is investing the time and resources to build a large and active network. The possibilities are endless -- collaboration on projects, networking to hire or get hired, crafting deals, referrals to and from IBM and its business partners. As a bonus, social networking is fun and good for morale. I look forward to continuing to be a part of the greaterIBM connection as it evolves. Upon e-tirement in 2001 after nearly four decades at IBM, I don't really feel like I left anyway! The stories that I have been writing since 1998 over at the patrickWeb blog fall into a number of categories. One section is devoted to "IBM Happenings". I am sure I will also be writing and linking at the greaterIBM connection along with others. Cross linking will increase the overall "connectedness". That's what the web is all about. I am really proud that IBM is taking networking and the blogosphere so seriously.
We all have our
favorites. Me too. Books, web sites, restaurants, plays, movies, orchestras, composers,
concerts, hiking and biking trails, places to run, etc. Occasionally
I write about these "favorites" even though they are
not really recommendations -- in fact some of them I did not even enjoy -- but rather a way of sharing information. I have documented some of the favorites in a database which can be viewed through the links below. When it comes to favorite
web pages, I started this list in 1995 and it grew to more than
1,000 "Favorite Places". I call them places because in a sense
they really are destinations.
After e-tirement from IBM in 2001 one of my (too many) goals is to "get technical" and make improvements to patrickWeb. I have really enjoyed working on this. The site, started in 1995, has been re-built with what is called a "LAMP" software bundle or "stack". That means it uses Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. All of these are free and open source. I use Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 to build the web pages and MovableType to post the blog entries. I will write some more about the LAMP technologies another time. The thing I am most proud of is converting most all of patrickWeb to being a database driven site. That means that instead of "updating" a web page with new information I update a database and then the web page is constructed to always use the latest information in the database. There are many advantages to this approach including flexibility in what information is presented on a page and how it is sequenced. A good example of this is the Favorites.
Each of the sections -- books, composers, concerts, plays, restaurants -- includes a database retrieval for just the particular category although the favorites database includes records for all of the categories. A blog "Favorites Update" page can include all the records in the database for all categories but only for the last thirty days or for any particular time period. The page is formed using a SQL query. (Structured Query Language -- invented at IBM by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce in the early 1970s). Using SQL, a page might contain favorite Cuban restaurants visited in the past year rated better than "3" and concerts that included "Clint Black" between 2002 and 2004 -- or whatever. Very powerful, and fun to create. At some point I plan to build a page on patrickWeb that let's any visitor create there own queries into the favorites database.
The month of October set a face pace for the last third of the year. The month was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. One of the most interesting announcements to me was that IBM announced new software and services to help ensure clients' success in creating a healthy IT environment based on a service oriented architecture. This comes on the heels of an announcement last month where the company unveiled innovations for healthcare that will have a dramatic impact on patients, hospitals and the general public. The key trends IBM pointed out were in secure sharing of patient data, fully-informed diagnosis from doctors, healthcare providers and hospitals, speeding drugs to market, and stemming the spread of pandemics.
Here are all the other announcements made by IBM during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
When you click on a link, a server in a datacenter somewhere gets the job of finding the web page or process you requested and delivering it to your browser over the Internet. One user on the Internet and one server at the other end serving one web page is quite trivial. With millions of users around the world visiting the web site at unpredictable times and making unpredictable requests for millions of documents, pictures, music, videos, processes and transactions, it can become a nightmare for the people who are managing the datacenter. In the last five years there has been a six-fold increase in computing capacity and a 160 fold increase in storage. Along with the increase in capacity comes a huge increase in complexity and in electrical power usage.
Imagine looking through a window into a corporate datacenter (even though many of them are underground and have no windows) and you would see thousands of steel boxes mounted in six-foot-high racks with cables everywhere. This part of the problem has been addressed by new technology called virtualization, pioneered by IBM decades ago but greatly refined in recent years. (See "Virtually Real or Really Virtual"). Imagine a virtual datacenter. When you peer through the window you see three boxes -- a server, a disk storage device, and a network card. There is a person at a large video console who is looking at what appears to be a dashboard. It shows a pictorial diagram of all the things going on in the datacenter. When one application area needs more server, storage, or network capacity the virtual datacenter automatically re-allocates capacity from another application area that currently has excess capacity. The virtual datacenter keeps resources balanced, and when a component fails, the virtual datacenter automatically allocates a spare or underutilized component to take over. Virtual environments allow a big reduction in complexity but the even bigger problem is the huge growth in electrical power. In many cases companies are not able to get the additional power they need either because the power company does not have the capacity or because the datacenter is not designed to accommodate the physical changes necessary. Even if the power was readily available there is a negative impact on the environment. Hence, Big Green.
IBM is redirecting $1 billion per year across its businesses, mobilizing the company’s resources to dramatically increase the level of energy efficiency in IT. The plan includes new products and services to enable IBM clients to sharply reduce data center energy consumption and make them more “green”. The problem is sizable. Big companies spend tons of money on power. In IBM's case it is a half billion dollars per year. The priority has been on getting the servers and storage that are needed to achieve various business results -- need another feature for the web site, throw in another server. Have growth in web visitors -- throw some more servers at it.
IBM is leading by example. One of their "green" projects is consolidating 3,900 servers onto 30 new top of the line mainframe servers. The result is not only more compute power but dramatically less use of electrical power and space. One of IBM's customers went from 300 servers to six. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center consolidated 1,000 servers onto 300 and saved $20m in costs while freeing up datacenter space for more hospital beds.
Datacenters have been popping up everywhere -- most of them built before 2001. The datacenters are very large rooms full of many different kinds of equipment -- designed in the same way they were decades ago -- like a kitchen where the stove puts out more heat so you turn on the air conditioning to cool down the entire room. The chef is comfortable and others in the room are freezing. IBM is designing datacenters for customers where cooling "zones" are specific to the type of equipment in each zone. Green datacenters not only save space and energy but also benefits the environment overall. In the past the electric bill has been allocated as overhead to all parts of the company. Redesigns are saving many millions of dollars. With the huge growth of energy for the IT infrastructure the CFO is reallocating energy expenditures from general overhead to the CIO so they can see what IT is really costing.
IBM has made a sizeable consulting business out of helping customers understand their energy usage and then designing and supervising the building of new Datacenters and cooling equipment. Having overseen the construction of thirty million square feet of advanced space, IBM has learned a lot. The virtualization is helping a lot too. It can now optimize the use of servers around energy use. For example, as workload declines, perhaps at night, servers can be virtualized and "moved" to underutilized servers and then automatically turn off the servers that are not needed for a few hours.
The month of September set a face pace for the last third of the year. The month was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. One of the most interesting announcements to me was that IBM unveiled innovations for healthcare that will have a dramatic impact on patients, hospitals and the general public. The key trends IBM pointed out were in secure sharing of patient data, fully-informed diagnosis from doctors, healthcare providers and hospitals, speeding drugs to market, and stemming the spread of pandemics.
Here are all the other announcements made by IBM during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
The price cut is understandable. It is not unprecedented by any means and the rebate was handled well by Apple. Nobody was forced to be an early adopter. People were forced to sign up for AT&T but it was no secret. It was announced that way, promoted that way, and is somewhat understandable even though I don't personally like it because of poor network coverage where I live and poor network performance when there is coverage. I can also understand why a warranty would be voided if people physically break in to the iPhone and modify it. That is a standard warranty provision with cars and most everything. A software modification is a different issue from my point of view.
I need to clarify my comment that I got "bricked" last week. Walt Mossberg properly corrected me that getting bricked means that your iPhone is not functioning at all -- it is like a brick. That is not what happened to me. I believe in most all cases where someone got bricked it was because they had tampered with the iPhone or somehow bypassed AT&T and enabled the phone to work with T-Mobile or someone else. I can understand why Apple would not like that because of their deal with AT&T and the fact that it has always been marketed as an Apple - AT&T exclusive arrangement. In my case, I made no attempt to change out AT&T. I just added the "installer" from AppTapp from Nullriver. This enabled me to add a bunch of third party applications that added a great deal of missing functions and new capabilities. I was really happy with the new applications.
I can understand that neither Apple nor AT&T would offer technical support for third party applications that they have not certified. I could even understand that they may require them to be uninstalled if suspected of causing a problem with the iPhone or the AT&T service for which I requested assistance. The issue I made in my last update was not of that nature. The issue was that Apple unilaterally *deleted* all the third party applications, including any data that may have been created by the apps, and also deleted the launcher and installer. An industry colleague described this unprecedented move by Apple as "hostile". I have to agree. Another colleague called it hubris. Some might describe it as arrogance.
I remember in the 1970's when IBM was accused of such an attitude. If a customer had a mainframe maintenance problem and they also had "third party" memory or peripheral devices attached to the mainframe, IBM would refuse to work on the mainframe or even diagnose the problem. Later they loosened up and agreed to "take a look" at the problem but only if someone was present from the maintenance department of the "other" company. IBM had a significant comeuppance as a result of the unwarranted attitude. Eventually -- in the late 1980's -- IBM saw a services opportunity in working on *all* of the customer's equipment, no matter who manufactured it.
A similar situation may be at hand for Apple. What could be better than having thousands of developers around the world creating useful applications for the iPhone? That is how Palm got established. Apple is now gaining on Palm but if they don't watch their hubris they may have a comeuppance.
The month of August is slow in many parts of the business world but it seems IBM took no break as the month was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. One of the most interesting announcements to me was that IBM had two scientific breakthroughs in the field of nanotechnology that could lead to new kinds of devices and structures built from a few atoms or molecules.
Here are all the other announcements made by IBM during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
The month of July at IBM was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The announcements included excellent earnings for the first quarter, continued moves with the company patent portfolio, some very large contract signings, the establishment of a Center of Excellence for Nuclear Power in France, a "Global Citizen's Portfolio" for IBM employees, and a project which will enable the company to consolidate about 3,900 computer servers onto about 30 System Z mainframes running Linux. On the people side of IBM a significant change occurred this month when
Dr. Paul Horn, senior vice president, IBM Research announced his retirement from IBM after 28 years. Succeeding him is Dr. John Kelly, III, most recently senior vice president, Technology and Intellectual Property.
I first met Paul Horn in 1994 when we were both members of what was then called the senior management group. Paul was head of IBM's Almaden Research Center and I was just beginning some grass roots efforts around the Internet. Two years later Paul took the helm at IBM Research and began a series of changes that were as profound as the evolution of the Internet. As had been the case for decades there continued to be major breakthroughs for IBM and society but Paul's major impact was transforming IBM's R&D and innovation model. IBM Research was already world renowned but Paul took it to the next level by increasing the focus on customer problems and speeding innovations to market that mattered to them. He also integrated exploratory work with more mature research, launched new strategic areas of huge importance such as computational biology and nanotechnology. Paul also opened up the labs to external influence and partnering with newly acquired companies and with clients.
Part of Paul's legacy will surely be the defeat of a chess grandmaster by the famous Deep Blue chess playing supercomputer, but the more important move was placing a big bet on a totally new kind of machine called Blue Gene that could solve previously unsolvable problems. The deep computing programs that Paul developed have had a profound effect on IBM's bottom-line while driving society-changing research programs in exploratory systems biology -- work that is aiming to tackle some of the toughest problems in healthcare, like battling cancer or understanding how drugs interact with the molecules inside the human body. One of the side benefits was IBM's entry into a multi-billion dollar life sciences business.
The best known business created by IBM Research has been around chips -- prior to Paul's reign, mostly used internally. The many advances of IBM scientists in chip design have lead to leaps in power, energy efficiency, and performance. The radical new design processes and exotic new materials pushed the limits of technology and made it possible for IBM PowerPC technology to be chosen by all of the top three game makers for the Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, and Playstation 3. .
Paul is a big thinker and introduced many new research disciplines including Autonomic Computing, an entire new academic discipline called Services Science, and the Global Innovation Outlook. He also built two new IBM Research labs in the emerging markets of India and China -- now the two fastest growing labs in IBM.
In short, Paul Horn has turned IBM Research into an engine of growth for IBM's software, services and hardware businesses. As Paul moves into e-tirement I have no doubt that he will continue to contribute a lot to the greater good. He has already taken up the position of Distinguished Scientist in Residence at New York University, where he plans to lecture, do research and explore book ideas. Here are all the other announcements made by IBM during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
Ken Wasch is a fellow alum (Economics and International Relations) from Lehigh University and a law graduate of SUNY Buffalo in New York. After spending eight years as a senior attorney for the U.S. Department of Energy working on petroleum price regulation, Ken saw the light and established the Software Publishers Association (1984) which is now the Software & Information Industry Association. I have known Ken for more than half of his twenty-two years in the industry, so when he called to ask me to participate in a conference to celebrate an important milestone for eCommerce, it was hard to resist.
A handful of us joined with Tim Berners-Lee to start the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT in December 1994. None of us at the time foresaw today's level or potential for eCommerce. Most of the focus at that time was on techniques for formatting web pages and on various other content related issues. Jim Clark, founder of Netscape, did see the eCommerce potential and he also realized one of the biggest inhibitors was the U.S. Government regulation of encryption, a key tool for making eCommerce secure. Jim and a handful of us started the Global Internet Project as a public policy group to gain more awareness about encryption and urge governments around the world to loosen the reigns. That effort was successful and use of encryption is no longer an inhibitor. (The inhibitor is insufficient Net Attitude to enable web sites to meet our needs).
There were many other complexities looming under the surface that could have dramatically stalled the growth of eCommerce. Collectively it was a hodgepodge of sticky issues -- like non-U.S. countires that objected to the U.S. control over key elements of the Internet infrastructure -- but the biggest issue was a lack of vision. There was no consistent framework for eCommerce that could enable businesses to move forward. One of the first of the Fortune 500 to put a stake in the ground was IBM Corporation where Lou Gerstner said in 1997 the web is not for surfing, it is for transactions -- later named e-Business. The gamble being taken by IBM and many others was that the Internet would become internationally politicized and potentially regulated to a standstill. Fortunately, there was a person in a high place in the government that would help solve many of the tough issues and enable President Clinton to announce a “Framework for Global Electronic Commerce” in the summer of 1997. It was a huge accomplishment for which we should all be eternally grateful. The person who lead the effort was Ira Magaziner, a top aide at the White House. Ira is best known for his efforts to create a major American healthcare program. His effort got attacked from every political direction and eventually fell. Unlike healthcare, the Internet was not well understood by politicians and they stayed out of the way as Ira raised and solved many of the key issues. He then traveled around the world enlightening key government leaders. The rest is history. At the conference last week Ira modestly said the event was "a good reminder of how far we have come and of how much opportunity still remains". Ken Wasch said “Electronic commerce has provided a significant engine for the growth of the global economy and has sparked the delivery of a multitude of innovative products and services.”
It was my privilege to serve on a panel moderated by Michael Mandel, chief economist of BusinessWeek. The other panelists were Stewart Baker, Assistant Secretary, Department of Homeland Security; Dan Burton, Senior Vice President, at Salesforce.com and former President of the Council on Competitiveness; Jamie Estrada, Assistant Secretary (Acting) at the U.S. Department of Commerce, and Ira Magaziner who is now Chairman of the Clinton Foundation. To set the stage for discussion, Michael announced the results of a poll of thought leaders in the industry in which they voted on the most significant "eCommerce Developments of the Last Decade". The results are so commonplace to all of us that it is hard to believe that they are ten years or so old. No surprise, Google (Sept. 1998) came out on top. Number two was when broadband penetration of US Internet users reached 50% (June 2004). Third was eBay Auctions (Launched Sept. 1997). Fourth was Amazon.com (went public in May 1997). Fifth was Google Ad Words (2000) which enabled key word advertising. Sixth -- Open Standards. Seven -- WiFi. Eight - User-Generated Content (YouTube 2005). Ninth was iTunes (2001) and last but not least, the BlackBerry (1999). See the SIIA press release for more details on the top ten.
It was my privilege to give the wrap-up talk which I called "The Future of the Internet". I asserted that the Internet has grown to it's infancy and that we have so far only seen five percent of what the Internet has in store for our business and personal lives. The examples used were things often written about here in patrickWeb. A video of Ira Magaziner's talk is here and my closing speech is here.
One of the scary things out there is the potential spread of infectious diseases such as avian influenza (bird flu), dengue fever, and other dangerous viruses. The challenge has always been to try to gain an understanding of how they spread -- what they will do next. Will the virus mutate? Will it jump across continents? Where are the greatest vulnerabilities? Can the path be predicted in time to get vaccine to the next area? There is now new hope to get our arms around these questions and more. IBM is donating some very sophisticated software to help scientists and public health officials build digital models of infectious diseases to help understand and plan more efficient responses to potential health crises. The software is known as Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler (STEM for short) and is one of the key technologies being used in the Global Pandemic Initiative, a collaborative effort of IBM and over twenty major worldwide public health institutions, including the Center for Disease Control and the World Health Organization to help prevent the spread of infectious diseases.
The Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler (STEM) tool is designed to help scientists and public health officials create and use spatial and temporal models of emerging infectious diseases. The models can not only aid in understanding diseases, but potentially even prevent them. The software, which was designed so that it will work on any type of computer, creates a graphical representation of the spread of a disease based on a variety of parameters such as population, geographic and macro-economic data, roadmaps, airport locations, travel patterns and bird migratory routes around the world. STEM also facilitates collaboration between governments, scientific researchers and other players in the public health community who can share the customized epidemiological models that STEM creates.
Policymakers responsible for creating strategies to contain diseases and prevent epidemics need an accurate understanding of disease dynamics and the likely outcomes of preventive actions. In an increasingly connected world with extremely efficient global transportation links, the patterns of infection can be quite complex. STEM allows the building of models involving multiple populations (species) and interactions between diseases. It would be speculative to say for sure but STEM is potentially a breakthrough that will large numbers of lives in the years ahead.
For any techies out there that want to download STEM, you can find it here. If you would rather just see a CNBC movie clip about it, take a look here.
The entire forum had a very global feel to it -- not just the venue but the participants. Americans were a small minority. The speakers and panelists for the rest of the day focused on the innovation theme of the forum and drilled down to the next level.
To cap off the day, my friend and just e-tired colleague Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger who is now Chairman Emeritus at the IBM Academy of Technology and Visiting Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT, gave a talk about the future of technology. To get our attention, Irving started by pointing out that the world now produces more transistors than grains of rice. He did not mention this but I know that IBM's new Power6 chip will have approximately 750 million transistors -- that's per chip! Irving went on to point out that there are fifteen petabytes (15 with 15 zeroes)) of data is being generated every day and that by 2010 supercomputers will execute one quadrillion calculations per second. Sounds like a lot but it will be needed to analyze the information being generated and to do it in "real time". Irving believes that modeling is the future -- including simulations of what is in your mind.
Better computational capabilities will mean 100 times faster interpretation of an MRI which in turn means that a surgeon will be able to see exactly what is going on inside of you while you are in surgery. A challenging area in the future will be biological viruses -- they will be a great threat and it will be a chess match to see if the white hats or black hats win. I am betting on the white hats. Technology will be able to predict the way viruses mutate and beat them to the pass. High speed computing will also make it possible to perform simultaneous and real-time translation -- not by human translators in a sound-proof booth, but by computers. You speak in Chinese and I hear you in my headset in English. Irving was quite enthusiastic about the role of virtual worlds in business, government and society. The games will lead to a three dimensional Internet with visual virtual interactive services. This is not just for kids. One of IBM's goals is to simulate the environmental behavior of the worlds river basins. The key to all these exciting breakthroughs is speed of execution and effective collaboration among government, academia and business. IBM is taking a leadership role with meetings such as this one.
The Russian Ethnographic Museum Reception and Gala Dinner was really special. I would be embarrassed to share the menu. Everyone loved the opera singer after dinner. Next morning and it was back to The Royal Philharmonic Hall where Henry Chow, Chairman, Greater China Group of IBM kicked things off and introduced Zhang Jianguo, Vice Chairman, Executive Director and President of the China Construction Bank. Everything in China is large scale and CCB is no exception. They have 5 million business customers and 270 million retail customers using 14,000 branches. The bank made more than $6 billion in profit last year.
Irving finished the morning with a panel which discussed how to drive an innovation agenda. It is really hard to summarize the perspective gained from listening to such smart people. I have tried to capture some thoughts about innovation in various postings here in patrickWeb. I would say the bottom line is that innovation is a really must do unless we want to live in an environment that is undifferentiated and commoditized. Sam made the point that if organizations focus only on taking out costs, they will be doomed with very low profits -- if not extinction.
Everyone agrees that Innovation starts at the top and Sam practices what he preaches -- not just by innovating in technologies (IBM turning out more patents year after year than any company in the world), but by innovating in strategies and business models. For example, it was Sam who led the charge to transform IBM from a hardware company to a hardware, software and services company. Especially the latter, when he acquired Price Waterhouse Consulting and smoothly integrated it into the IBM portfolio of services. He also led the sale of the PC business. Some people viewed it as simply a "sale" but in reality it was a highly innovative change to the IBM business model -- selling off a low margin business but retaining the services aspect of it and at the same time gaining a stronger foothold in the Chinese market opportunity. Now he is extending the company reach and effectiveness at the same time by thinking and acting globally. Looks like he is on the right track to me.
The 2007 Business Leadership Forum, the five such event hosted by IBM, took place in St. Petersburg, Russia and included two days of discussion about innovation and the challenges facing businesses and government in the 21st century. IBM Chairman, President and CEO Sam Palmisano welcomed the 450 invited guests representing more than 75 countries to the forum at The Royal Philharmonic Hall. Simultaneous translation of the speakers was provided in ten different languages.
Sam opened the meeting with the theme of "Innovation That Matters". He described a view of a new computing model based on a global infrastructure which is open, flexible, integrated, collaborative, and autonomic. He did not make any product or services pitch but it is clear that the new infrastructure described happens to directly map to SOA (software group), Blades and Virtualization (systems group), and Business Transformation Services (services group) -- the three major parts of IBM's business. Sam also described the trend toward convergence of software and services -- this plays directly to two great strengths of IBM. The not too subtle point was also made that the infrastructure of the future is much more like Google than Microsoft.
One of the basic premises of the forum -- nicely set up by Sam -- was that very large numbers of people are entering the "middle class" around the world and this is going to drive large demand for consumer products and services and upstream demand for suppliers of all kinds. For example, Russia expects to have 70% of the population using the Internet by 2010, right around the corner. Most everyone is aware of what is similarly happening in China, India, and Eastern Europe. These huge new opportunities demand a premium on innovation. Sam continuously drove the point that globalization is driving an expanding horizon for innovation and it seems to me that IBM's strategy is to collaborate with the customers, academia, and governments around the world. to will result in breakthroughs in the company's products, services, and management culture. For IBM customers it should mean a big boost in assistance for their business models and business processes.
Sam described how globalization has evolved -- international companies, to multinational companies to globally integrated companies. IBM is practicing what it preaches and is shaping its strategy, management and operations in a truly global way. Becoming a globally integrated enterprise means that it is locating operations and functions anywhere in the world based on the right cost, the right skills, and the right business environment. The company now has more than 10,000 employees in China and more than 50,000 in India.
An interesting perspective was then offered by a global leader -- Fujio Cho, Chairman, Toyota Motor Corporation. Toyota is truly a value-based giant -- the world's largest automaker by sales revenue as of the first sales quarter of 2007 -- that has been widely recognized for contributions to society in America. Mr. Cho described many innovative ideas including building a car that is accident free and cleans the air in the environment as you drive it. In the production area he described "jidoka", an unprecedented idea, which basically means that any employee can stop the entire production process if they see something wrong.
The next part of the forum focused on business model innovation and was chaired by Ginni Rometty, Senior Vice President for Global Business Services at IBM. She was followed by Carlota Perez, Professor of Technology and Development at the University of Tallinn, Estonia who talked about the five great surges in the last 240 years: the industrial revolution (age of steam, coal, iron and railways), the age of steel and heavy engineering (electrical, chemical, civil, naval), the age of the automobile with oil petrochemicals and mass production and now the age of information technology and telecommunications. Next will be the age of biotech, bio electronics, nanotech and custom materials. Carlota asserted that each surge takes 40-60 yeas to spread across the world.
The flight from Frankfurt, Germany arrived in St. Petersburg, Russia right on time and there was an hour to spare before the opening reception of the Business Leadership Forum at The State Hermitage Museum. I couldn't resist a walk to "St. Petersburg's Most Beautiful", a virtual geocache. A virtual cache is a cache that exists in the form of the location itself. There is no Tupperware container with a treasure to retrieve or log book to sign. In order to record a virtual find at geocaching.com, you must go to the cache coordinates and typically answer a question to validate that you were actually there. In this case the question was how many "onions" can be seen on the Church of the Saviour of Spilled Blood. It was a good walk to get to the cache location and when I turned the final corner the onion domes and sheer beauty made my mouth drop open. See pictures in the gallery.
The Church was just the first of many incredible sights that I would see before the day was over. This was my third visit to Russia and second time to visit St. Petersburg (see travel section of blog for more on this). One could go there every year for many years and not see a fraction of what the great city has to offer. Tsar Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg in 1703 as a "window to Europe" and it served as the capital of the Russian Empire for more than two hundred years. With 11 time zones and 140 ethnic groups, Russia is a really big and interesting place. Much more history about St. Petersburg can be found here.
Got back to the Astoria Hotel in a nick of time to get ready for the reception in the courtyard of The State Hermitage Museum along with four hundred colleagues from business, government, and academia. It was really great to see many old friends and to make many new acquaintances. We were greeted by Sam Palmisano and Dr. Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the museum. Dinner was followed by a private "White Nights Tour" of arguably the most impressive museum in the world. It certainly rivaled the reception and dinner at the Vatican at last year's BLF. From late May to early July the nights are bright in St. Petersburg -- it doesn't get dark. It was a strange phenomenon to leave the tour at midnight and walk outside and find it still light. St. Petersburg’s is at 59 degrees latitude, about the same as Oslo, Norway (see Norway 2007).
The State Hermitage Museum is another of those things that you have to see to believe. There are more than three million pieces of art including original works by Leonardo: Madonna with a Flower (The Benois Madonna, 1478) and Madonna Litta (1490-1491). We breezed through a number of the 500 rooms of the museum where there were over twenty works by Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, one of the greatest artists in the history of the world. We saw works by Cezanne, van Gogh, and Picasso, just to name a few. Words can not do justice to what we saw but the Hermitage web site does a really good job of sharing the beauty and expanse.
After a short sleep it was time to get to business at the Business Leadership Forum. A post about the next two days will follow shortly.
The month of May at IBM was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. One of the biggies is that IBM has allocated $1 billion for green technology.
Called “Project Big Green,” IBM’s initiative targets corporate data centers
where energy constraints and costs can limit their ability to grow. Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
It was good to run into a lot of old friends in Orlando this week at the IBM Impact 2007 technology conference. I would have to say that it was a defining event. With 4,200 customers, IBM business partners, and IBMers attending there was obviously something really big happening. The Marriott Orlando World Center was buzzing with activity in every hall, ballroom, salon, patio, and restaurant.
The main subject of the conference was SOA. Only the most brilliant technical people could come up with SOA as a name for something. Let's see, is it safe operating area,
School of the Americas,
Skies of Arcadia (a Nintendo game), Society of Actuaries, state of the art, or the
Sarbanes-Oxley Act? Nope. Maybe it is about an architectural firm that has great customer service the architecture of a building that has a good service entrance? Neither. The SOA that brought thousands of people together in Orlando stands for "service oriented architecture". It is really important.
The wikipedia has a comprehensive definition of SOA but basically it is about a new way to get things done with software. Actually it is isn't new -- the idea has been around for decades -- but now it is really happening. It is so much a part of the vernacular at IBM that they just matter of factly call it "so a". After an IBM briefing about "virtualization" a year ago, I tried to explain the word in simple terms (see Virtually Real or Really Virtual). I'll try that approach here with SOA.
In a nutshell, SOA will allow web sites to do much more than “click here to buy”. In fact web sites built with SOA will result in us standing in fewer lines in the physical world and have to endure fewer telephone call centers that want to control us. Fulfillment models at our favorite retailer’s web site will result in the staple goods we need just showing up outside the garage door when we need them. If businesses have the right attitude, SOA will enable them to get closer to the ultimate Internet -- to build a people-oriented and user-friendly integrated experience for all parties involved - employees on the intranet, suppliers, customers, partners, analysts and prospective constituents. There is more to this story.
Over the last fifty years there has been an explosion of computer applications, but many of them were built in silos and were highly inflexible. In some cases companies thought decentralization was the answer so they allowed divisions and departments to do their own thing. The result was that many have a hodgepodge of incompatible systems that nobody is happy with. The web took things a big leap forward. At last there was a common way (the browser) for accessing and displaying information, even though the applications that run on the server -- that do the pricing, inventory lookups, shipping estimates, invoicing, etc. -- are still proprietary and usually tied to one particular IT vendor or system. The applications have also been very monolithic; i.e. in order to fulfill the expectations of customers on the web the application has to do the whole job. Soup to nuts; present the right price, confirm if the item is in stock, calculate shipping, and confirm the status of the order. Increasingly, customers want to get access directly into the supply chain and see exactly where their order stands. In short, applications have gotten larger and more complicated -- harder, not easier.
SOA -- arguably the biggest change in information technology in decades -- is poised to change the way applications are created and how they interoperate. Instead of building a monolithic application that takes a customer order, does credit checks, checks inventory, looks through the supply chain, arranges for payment, charges the customer, clears credit card transactions, etc., with SOA these various functions are built as separate "pieces". Think Legos. The individual programs are called "services" and they are called upon as needed. A sales tax calculation "service", for example, could be used by many different divisions of a company thereby eliminating redundancy. IBM has been practicing what it preaches in this regard. It has reduced the number of programs it uses to run the company from 16,000 to a mere 4,000.
The SOA services do not all have to be developed or acquired internally. Thanks to the Internet, services can be "rented" from others. For example, suppose that a company called American Specialties Inc. (ASI) specializes in selling American goods for delivery mostly outside of America. They want to create an application to sell their products on the web. The trickiest part of the application is determining the best way to ship the product to ensure it gets there when the customer wants it and at the lowest cost. ASI doesn't’t have the skills to write this particular part of the application and they haven’t bee able to find a vendor with a software package that can do it and which is compatible with the rest of ASI’s software.
It turns out that there is another company called Rates and Costs Inc. (RCI), which specializes in the calculation of optimum routes and the associated costs for shipment to places anywhere in the world. RCI offers the calculation as a service on the web and it is the exact function ASI needs to incorporate into their web application. Since RCI follows the SOA standards, ASI is able to see the specifications for RCI’s service – what inputs are required and what output does it produce. RCI could have created their calculation service using any IT platform they choose -- the standards assure that things can work together.
The programmer at ASI likes RCI’s program because it performs exactly the right function that ASI needs and the software has already been written and tested! ASI follows the SOA standards to incorporate RCI’s service into their web application. Whenever a user goes to ASI’s web page and needs shipment route and cost information, a link is made behind the scenes to RCI’s web server to get the information. ASI’s customers don’t know, nor will they care, that part of the job is being done by RCI’s server; not ASI’s server. ASI makes an arrangement to pay RCI each time one of ASI’s customers uses the RCI web service.
Creating programs by linking to other programs without regard to what programming language was used to create the others’ programs represents a whole new paradigm. It is one of the information technology industry’s holy grails. Standards organizations, such as Oasis, have been attempting for years to create a “neutral” programming environment. The UNIX vendors – HP, DEC, Sun, IBM, Data General, and others – formed various organizations, councils and consortia over the years attempting to bring things together. Progress was made but none of these initiatives achieved real openness and true compatibility across the information technology industry -- until SOA. It is not really new but it is time. Open Internet standards and SOA tools are making it happen.
SOA will make it possible for the web to evolve from a web of content to a web of content and applications. SOA will enable server-to-server interaction in addition to browser to server interactions. Servers will negotiate with other servers and even complete transactions by themselves with no direct human intervention. These interactions will replace the paper forms and faxes that flow back and forth from company to company today.
E-business evolved to on demand. At this stage many enterprises have bought in to the concept but are struggling with how to get there. This is why many web sites don't fully meet our needs -- they are dependent on many independent applications that the enterprise has had for decades and so far have been unable to integrate them. SOA is the new model -- it offers the first comprehensive, standards based way to get the job done. Adoption of SOA will enable the interoperability within the many functions and departments of enterprises and between enterprises that has been a decades long dream. History has shown that adoption of standards leads to an explosion of usage and that will surely be the case with SOA. The SOA standards will enable entire industries to be brought together. Virtual corporations comprised of a federation of smaller ones will enable “hyper competition” on a global scale.
How does "Web 2.0" fit into all this? Like a ball and glove. Quite the hot topic in tech circles and among venture capitalists, Web 2.0 is basically a style, a model, an approach, and a philosophy wrapped together. It includes a "lightweight" programming model that is more like webpage development than traditional programming. A key element of 2.0 is the blog feed -- a way to allow people to look at a web page but also subscribe to it. Another element is AJAX, a technique built on a collection of Internet standards that produces a rich user experience -- kayak.com is a good example -- with pages that don't "reload", they just change while you are looking at them. Another characteristic of Web 2.0 is that it is a perpetual beta -- users treated as co-developers. The philosophy is "release early and release often". One final element that I consider part of 2.0 is the PHP scripting language. Some professionals have considered it "rinky-dink" but IBM is taking it quite seriously. Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow and CTO for IBM WebSphere, said PHP has widespread skills, an active community, viral marketing, and growing deployments.
All things considered, IBM really has it's act together with regard to SOA. Every software and services executive is well versed on it and has it baked into their business and development plans. The promise is great and with tens of thousands of software engineers and management support I think it is fair to expect IBM to deliver. They have already made dozens of acquisitions to fill in the white spaces in their vision. Major customers are signing up and getting results. Much more at ibm.com, including tips and techniques, customer testimonials, and business partners.
The month of April at IBM was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. Many of the announcements are occurring in the healthcare area. I was particularly impressed hearing that the Mayo Clinic and IBM are advancing real-time medical imaging.
Collaborators from Mayo Clinic and IBM have exploited parallel computer architecture
and memory bandwidth to dramatically speed up the processing of 3-D medical images. Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
Visiting China is an eye opener culturally and economically. It is a rapidly developing country and it appears that special interest groups do not get in the way of progress. Perhaps it was the same way when America was building the Hoover Dam or the Interstate Highway system. I was quite impressed with aviation in China. We took five flights within the country. Not sure how many airlines they have in total -- the Air Travel Guide for China lists seven. The ones we used all had new aircraft, they took off and landed on time, and the flight attendants were young, friendly and efficient. You had the feeling they really cared about your comfort. While U.S. airlines have eliminated pillows and blankets in economy seating, the Chinese airlines seemed to have an unlimited supply. Every flight, even if 45 minutes, had food. Check-in and security lines moved efficiently even though the airports and the number of people in them were huge. There are various claims made about airports but I don't think there is any debate that Beijing will soon be the largest -- and take just three years to complete.
In the U.S., we are very fortunate to have
a transportation system that is highly reliable and gets us to where we want
to go in an amazingly short time. The travel industry is a complex one and there
is a huge legacy of process, management systems, and technology that makes
it difficult to be as flexible and nimble as we all would like. The Chinese do not have all the legacy baggage -- no pun intended. Having offered
that perspective, it is still at times incredible what we put up with.
The return flight from Beijing actually pulled away from the gate twenty minutes early, took off right on time, and landed at Newark Liberty International Airport exactly on schedule. After the plane sat on the tarmac for a few minutes, the captain announced that there would be a hold while they
"waited for a gate assignment". The few minutes turned out to be ninety minutes. Someone knew for at least twelve hours when the flight
would land yet there was no assigned place for it to go after landing. Apparently there was a mechanical problem with one of the planes that was occupying the space assigned to our plane. Since it was an international flight the plane needed to go to a certain terminal. Could we have been placed on a bus and be taken to that terminal? Newark is a very large airport and you would think there would be some way to park the plane and get the passengers to immigration. Could the problem have been an information problem? Could
it be that that the flight arrival system and the gate scheduling system do
not communicate?
Being a pilot myself, I feel confident in the men and
women in the cockpit of an airline aircraft. Knowing a bit about the FAA regulations, I feel confident in the procedures for flying and safety
inspections. When it comes to information oriented aspects of the airline industry
I am much less confident. The lack of systems and applications integration becomes so
painfully obvious. At times a plane gets to the gate on time but there is no one there to open the door. Another information
breakdown? Perhaps the person was overworked and busy managing another flight
but you certainly get the feeling that better information flow
could make the airplane and people "flows" work better.
Japan Airlines
has been using message queuing technology for more than ten years to enable their flight arrival system and their
gate scheduling system to communicate. Message queuing technology can enable
two (or more) incompatible systems to exchange messages so that
things can be coordinated. Today's Service Oriented Architecture makes it much easier than ten years ago and it is very hard to justify having systems that don't communicate with each other (or a solid plan to get there).
I am sure many people could top the tarmac story from Newark but I doubt if anyone could top the Fire
Truck incident though!
Epilogue to the epilogue: If you are interested in tracking flights, airplanes, or activities at airports, take a look at http://flightaware.com/
The month of March at IBM was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. In the public sector, IBM will develop a data management system that will provide detailed information about
student performance and progress for New York City's public schools. Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here
The month of February at IBM was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. I was particularly pleased to see IBM introduce Jam Consulting Service.
The new service will help drive innovation by initiating dynamic new
forms of collaboration among employees, stakeholders, customers, and partners for many companies.
Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
The month of January at IBM was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. I was particularly proud to see IBM surpass its own record and earn more U.S.
patents than any other company for the fourteenth consecutive year. Many useful products and services will come from those patents over the years ahead. Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
The month of December at IBM was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. I was particularly interested to see that IBM and Circuit City Stores, Inc. are exploring how to apply virtual worlds and 3-D environments to retail business models.The result could lead to new growth areas. Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
The month of November at IBM was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. I was particularly pleased to see IBM put it's money where it's mouth is with respect to innovation. The company announced it's intention to invest $100 million in innovation ideas that were generated by InnovationJam, an unprecedented experiment in online collaborative innovation held earlier this year. The result could lead to new growth areas. Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
The month of October at IBM was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. I was particularly pleased to see IBM put it's money where it's mouth is with respect to China as it announced a plan to jointly invest there with Lehman Brothers. Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
Seems like healthcare issues are being discussed in the media everyday. The bad news is that there are medical errors and runaway costs that are becoming painfully more obvious. The good news is that hospital management is working very hard to improve their systems, community doctors are beginning to invest in more automated systems, and the governments of the world are very focused on standards for healthcare information. It is a long process but it is happening. IT vendors are very focused also. In the U.S., healthcare expenditures are nearly $2 trillion. It is estimated that 20% of that is for duplicate procedures. A good chunk of the $400B in duplication can be saved through improved IT systems.
IBM has been making a large investment in healthcare solutions that use it's software, systems, and technology. More importantly the company acquired Healthlink, along with 600 of the top healthcare thought leaders in America. IBM has just released a new seventy-two page report called Healthcare 2015:
Win-win or lose-lose? (Please note that the pdf file is 3 megabytes in size). The report describes a "portrait and a path to
successful transformation" that will become a "how to" book for many healthcare leaders around the world. Some of the background and statistics cited will really get your attention -- like the World Health Organization rating the United States #37 in the world on overall health system performance.
Most of us have experienced the duplicate data problem. A doctor finds it easier to order a new blood test than to get the data from a blood test you had a few days before. As consumers we are finding the data to be out of our reach. Blood tests start with blood which then goes into analytical equipment which creates digital information about the blood. The best "data" you can hope for is to get a faxed copy of the results. Contrast this with the financial part of our lives where millions of people use various software to download, record, store, analyze, and review every detail of their financial life. When it comes to data about our health we are mostly isolated -- even though it is our data. This is going to change dramatically as standards and online systems emerge for EMR's (electronic medical records). EMR's will enable us to get control over our health data and also allow healthcare providers to have access to it -- authorized by us as we see fit. There are many resources available about EMR's if you want to learn more. In fact, you can securely store and manage your personal health records for free at myNDMA. The site allows you to access your medical images -- for example, mammograms and other x-rays -- and electronic health records whenever you need them. You can also document your personal and family medical history and have your records available to you on-demand to give to a new doctor or to get a second opinion. One step closer to getting control of our health data.
The human brain is one of the many marvelous parts of humans. It has been quite interesting over the last few years to read books and hear lectures on the subject. (See references in patrickWeb). The complexity of the brain can appear overwhelming but Big Blue is trying to make it understandable by working with a team of computational neuroscientists in Switzerland on a project called The Blue Brain. The goal of the project -- being developed at the Brain Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne-- is to create a digital 3D model of the brain.
IBM’s Blue Genesupercomputer is helping to advance our understanding of important biological processes such as protein folding and a growing list of applications including hydrodynamics, quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics, climate modeling and financial modeling. The topics have vocabularies of many-syllable words but they are changing the world for the better. The Blue Gene supercomputer has a peak speed of 360 Teraflops. In layman terms that means that the machine can perform 360,000,000,000,000 (trillion) calculations every second. That kind of horsepower doesn't match the human brain but it is getting closer. I have seen a Blue Gene in operation at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. It is a sight to behold.
Back to brains. The idea is to create a detailed model of the circuitry in the neocortex – the largest and most complex part of the human brain. Over time, the project hopes to model other areas of the brain and eventually build an accurate, computer-based model of the entire brain. The process starts with "wet" chemistry. A dye is injected into each neuron of the brain to reveal a kind of map called a morphology. After gaining a view of the neurons, it sets the groundwork to build a digital model in the Blue Gene that emulates the real thing. The neocortex is organized into thousands of columns of neurons. Each column has a diameter of less than two one-hundredths of an inch and contains 10,000 neurons. Each neuron stands a little more than 1/16 inches high and receives over 10,000 inputs from other neurons. Suffice it to say that the brain is a very complex thing. In the case of Blue Brain, the end result will be a greatly enhanced understanding of how the human brain works which will lead to curing the things that can go wrong with it. A better understanding of the brain -- the supercomputer of all supercomputers -- will also help develop even better supercomputers.
The month of September at IBM was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. I am particularly excited about IBM's plans to build Cell Broadband Engine supercomputer. The revolutionary supercomputer, capable of a peak performance of over 1.6 petaflops, will be installed at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
There have been several stories here about alphaWorks. Today is a special day as IBM celebrates the tenth anniversary of the program. It was an honor for me to be part of the event in San Francisco. I made some remarks today about why and how alphaWorks was created but I decided to go further here and republish part of a chapter of my book, Net Attitude, where I gave some background on what alphaWorks is all about. It was part of a bigger subject called "Organizing to get things done". Today we might call it collaborative innovation.
From Net Attitude (Perseus Publishing), November 2001
The most important ingredients to accomplishing great things as an e-business are to find, attract, recruit, hire, motivate, and retain really great people. Every year the crop of students gets better so you have to continually raise the bar -- look at every movement of staff and ask yourself if you are improving your hand. Everyone has to not only bring
something to the table but bring unique value to the overall equation.
When
things are working right the whole organization breeds and feeds on itself.
If the caliber of your team is high, there's a much greater likelihood of being able to attract additional high caliber people. Once you have them it is critical to nurture and support Net Attitude and to have creative programs to take advantage of their skills.
Every CEO I spoke to during the 1990'2 wanted to know how to make e-business web projects go faster. Every CIO I have met worries about e-business web projects going too fast. The CIO has spent decades getting information technology under control and making it reliable. Fast moving projects are sometimes in conflict with that goal. The solution to the dilemma is multifaceted but one key element is to have a "Skunk Works" where rapid prototyping is the modus operandi.
I am a bit late in posting the August "IBM Happenings". The month of August is slow in some parts of the world and at some companies but at IBM it was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. I am particularly excited about IBM's growing leadership in the healthcare area. Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
Greater IBM has made a "call for core connectors". Hmmm. Core connectors? What kind of cores are they that need to be connected? Most of the current IBMers are not old enough to remember "core" memory that was used in mainframes. Core connectors also sounds like something from a Lego parts list. Both of these thoughts are nostalgic but we all know that is not what IBM has in mind.
The goal is to build a social networking community -- a "place" where the possibilities are endless -- collaboration on projects, personal networking for jobs and deals, referrals to and from IBM, and networking just for the fun of it. One of the key questions being asked is how does Greater IBM get highly-networked 'core connectors' to spend the time to help get things going and spur organic growth of the community. Not easy for sure.
The challenge is that the people who are the best networkers are already so busy networking that it is hard to motivate them to take on yet another "channel" of communications. I encounter the same challenge at the numerous boards where I am privileged to serve and that have the same goals as IBM -- building their communities. I don't claim to have the magic answer but in short the best approach I have seen over the years is to apply tenacious program management, just as IBM is doing. Occasional emails from people encouraging the "cc's" to visit the blog and or group and post something eventually work. It is a given that the people with the most to contribute are also the ones with the least time and so the occasional nudge often causes things to happen.
The other angle is to publicize success stories about how the community has actually helped someone. It is best if the person actually helped tells their own story -- again perhaps with a little prodding. The successes are often subtle and indirect. It isn't that someone posts "I need a job" and they get an email with an offer for the dream job. More likely the job (or deal) comes from someone who knows someone who knows someone who read something about an opportunity or a person and then was able to make the connection. Sometimes there are multiple bank shots involved. Here is an example of what I mean.
I started writing "reflections" in 1996 and they evolved into my blog. In the early days of RSS (really simple syndication) many people didn't know what a blog reader was and didn't know how to include an RSS feed into their browser or news portal. I started enabling people to "subscribe" to my blog in a way that generates an email version of each story that I write. There are now more approximately 400 people who read patrickWeb via email. When readers like a story they tend to forward it to their friends and this results in more subscribers and more readers. Some of the readers are reporters. Sometimes a reporter will send an email asking for an interview. The interview gets covered in the press. XYZ Company decides to hold a conference for their customers and they call or visit the Washington Speakers Bureau to get an outside speaker. The WSB refers XYZ to the interview that was in the press and sets up an engagement for a paid speech. In some cases the story that lead to the chain of events may have had nothing to do with the ultimate subject of interest to XYZ -- it was the communications that lead to something that lead to something, etc. The same principles apply to getting a job or landing a deal.
Building the community and getting tangible results from it takes a lot of time and tenacity. Greater IBM is on the case and making progress. I encourage all of us out there with stories to tell to keep telling them. You never know where they will lead.
The month of July is slow in some countries and companies but at IBM it was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. I am particularly excited about IBM's growing leadership in the healthcare area. Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
The month of June was filled with a slew of IBM announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. I am particularly excited about IBM's continued leadership in the supercomputer business.
BlueGene/L has set the record for a scientific application by achieving a sustained performance in excess of 200 teraFLOPS. Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
One of the many innovations Sam Palmisano has spearheaded at IBM is the idea of reaching out to "alumni". The first initiative was a few years ago when he started a semi-annual reception for executives and former executives of the company. That was just the beginning and now the idea of reaching out has been opened up big time. The number of past and present IBMers is probably close to a million people. Establishing communications with such a huge base can be nothing but a good thing for the company.
When I left engineering school and joined IBM in 1967, it was common to look for a job at a company and expect to stay there your entire career. Nobody thinks that way anymore. If you tell someone you were with a company for decades, they might ask "what's the matter, couldn't you find any other jobs?". Another change is in the old days if someone left the company they were considered a traitor and barred from coming back. Today, there are many executives that left the company at some point, got some experience at one or more other companies, and then brought that experience back into IBM.
The Internet has enabled everything to be connected to everything, so setting up a blog to "connect" past, present, (and maybe future) IBMers to each other and with the company seems like a very good idea. The The first step was the Google Group, the logical step two is the new Greater IBM blog. Over time other forms of web technology such as wikis, audio and video podcasts, instant messaging, and various mobile technologies will likely enter the mix.
The possibilities are endless -- collaboration on projects, personal networking for jobs and deals, referrals to and from IBM, and social networking for the fun of it. I look forward to being part of this as it evolves. Upon e-tirement in 2001 with nearly four decades at IBM, I don't really feel like I left anyway! Feel free to visit patrickWeb. There are a number of categories that I have been writing about for more than ten years. Things related to IBM are at this site, I am sure I will be writing about and linking to the Greater IBM blog as will others. Cross linking will increase the overall "connectedness". That's what the web is all about. I am really proud that IBM is taking the blogosphere so seriously.
This week I attended an IBM software technology briefing about SOA. Only brilliant technical people could come up with SOA as a name for something. Let's see, is it safe operating area,
School of the Americas,
Skies of Arcadia (a Nintendo game), Society of Actuaries, state of the art, or the
Sarbanes-Oxley Act? Nope. Maybe it is about an architectural firm that has great customer service? Or maybe it is about the architecture of a building that has a good service entrance? Neither. The SOA of the briefing stands for "service oriented architecture". It is really important. The wikipedia has a comprehensive definition of SOA but basically it is about a new way to get things done with software. Actually it is isn't new -- the idea has been around for decades -- but now it is really happening. It is so much a part of the vernacular at IBM that they just matter of factly call it "so a". After an IBM briefing about "virtualization" a year ago, I tried to explain the word in simple terms (see Virtually Real or Really Virtual). I'll try that approach here with SOA.
In a nutshell, SOA will allow web sites to do much more than “click here to buy”. In fact web sites built with SOA will result in us standing in fewer lines in the physical world and have to endure fewer telephone call centers that want to control us. Fulfillment models at our favorite retailer’s web site will result in the staple goods we need just showing up outside the garage door when we need them. If businesses have the right attitude, SOA will enable them to get closer to the ultimate Internet -- to build a people-oriented and user-friendly integrated experience for all parties involved - employees on the intranet, suppliers, customers, partners, analysts and prospective constituents. There is more to this story. (read more)
The month of May was filled with a slew of IBM announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. I am particularly excited about IBM's leadership with OpenAjax.
There are a few skeptics emerging and that is how I know that Ajax is sure to be a really big thing. It will change the Internet experience for all of us more than anything so far. Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
The month of April had the normal slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. Being "tax" month, the company announced a new solution for optimizing tax auditing.
IBM's Tax Audit and Compliance Solution uses advanced analytics to help revenue agencies zero in on questionable tax returns.
There was also a milestone in April. Ten years ago, IBM WebSphere Commerce -- then known as Net.Commerce -- made its debut at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. Thousands of customers later, WebSphere Commerce is one of the best-selling e-commerce applications on the market, running many of the world's top e-commerce sites. Most of the top 100 online retailers use the middleware to power their Web sites that generate billions of dollars of online revenues. I am sure some will say it was great planning, but those of us who were there at the time know that the "ticket server" for the Olympic Games was an experiment. At about $5m in ticket sales it turned out to be the largest e-commerce site on the web at the time. The first real customer was L.L. Bean, Inc. of Freeport, Maine. See the complete history of Websphere Commerce here.
Here are the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
On Monday and Tuesday of this week a number of analysts and consultants gathered with IBM at an intellectual property briefing in Greenwich, Connecticut. Not as glamorous as the meeting in Rome but exceptionally interesting. The term intellectual property reflects the idea that the subject matter is a product of the mind and that legal rights to the "IP" are protected in the same way as any other form of property.
IP is a vital issue for many companies but probably no company has as much influence in this area as IBM. IP is a broad and deep subject but one of the key elements is patents.
The United States granted the first patent to Samuel Hopkins of Pittsford, Vermont in 1790. Mr. Hopkin's idea had to do with making potash which in turn was used in making glass and in various industrial processes.Two other major patents granted the same year were related to making candles and milling flour. Earlier this year the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced that for the thirteenth consecutive year, IBM received more patents than any other private sector organization in America. No company, other than IBM, has yet been granted 2,000 patents in any year while IBM exceeded 3,000 four years in a row and last year had 1,100 more than anybody else. IBM has a portfolio of more than 40,000 patents globally and has another 21,000 U.S. patent applications pending. Potentially more significant than IBM's leadership in creating inventions is the fact that it is giving away thousands of patents. See Patent Commons (January 2005).
The industrial age focused on proprietary innovation and patents became the key differentiator for technology companies such as IBM. In the 1970's and 1980's there was a lot of cross-licensing to provide freedom of action; e.g. IBM cross-licensed with many other technology companies so that it could be able to ship it's products without any concerns about patent infringement. Since IBM's inventiveness created a lot more patent licensing income than licensing expense, the IP business became a major source of income -- to the tune of a $1 billion per year and mostly profit. Now that the industrial age has given over to a knowledge economy based on collaborative innovation, IBM has begun to re-evaluate it's IP strategy and begin to leverage IP as a new source of business growth.
Since IBM has a very large group of engineers and scientists who are prolific inventors, the patent portfolio is sure to grow and the income from it will be significant for quite some time. The company has more than 1,000 active licenses whereby companies pay IBM to use it's patents -- that represents about a third of IBM's IP income. Another third comes from joint development; e.g. with Sony, Toshiba, and Samsung where the companies work together on a project and then share the results. A prominent example was the development of the Cell processor which is used in the new Sony PS3 game console. A final third of IBM's IP income is from the assignment of patents for things that IBM invented but does not want to pursue on it's own -- digital cameras, liquid crystal displays, the laser used in eye surgery, setup boxes, and many other things.
Technologists working in healthcare and education cheered the move by IBM to allow them royalty-free access to its patent portfolio for the development and implementation of selected open healthcare and education software standards built around web services, electronic forms and open document formats. If new application software is developed in these key industries, society is better off and IBM will get it's fair share of the hardware, software and services opportunity. Very smart. To leverage internal ideas, IBM has created ThinkPlace -- a next generation suggestion program where employees don't just submit an idea and hope to get an award but where they tee up an idea and enable others to build upon the idea and collaborate to take it to the next level.
IBM is also leveraging it's IP by using it to solve problems for it's clients through services engagements. For example, a group of PhD's from IBM Research helped a limousine company optimize the routes of it's cars to minimize wait time and fuel costs
The world of patents has become ever more complex across the spectrum of collaboration and competition as the world has moved from proprietary to open -- as the world has gotten flat. Patents issued have skyrocketed in the past dozen years -- more than 150,000 patents issued in 2000, and so have patent suits. The thousands of suits are taking a huge economic toll and in many cases are stifling innovation. Patent reform has become urgent. IBM is not waiting on the sidelines. It is taking a leadership role and encouraging progressive changes. For example, it has launched initiatives to improve the quality of patents by developing and proposing an index to evaluate if a patent meets the standards of patentability -- in other words, to test if the patent is really legitimate. These efforts are not just for IBM but for the entire economy.
Hopefully the politicians, many of whom have links to trial lawyer associations, won't kill the pending patent reform legislation.
The Business Leadership Forum was quite an experience and is hard to summarize. IBM did a good job of organizing it and everyone there appreciated it and learned a lot -- I certainly did. As with most conferences, a lot of the value was in talking to people at breaks. Dinner at the Vatican is next to impossible to describe. It was the proverbial "you had to be there" thing. Here are some of the key insights delivered by Sam and his speakers and panelists during the conference...
Innovation is essential and what the 21st century is all about
Change is faster and more disruptive than ever
Globalization is inevitable
Ubiquitous connectivity is breaking down physical borders and creating connections between people, economies, organizations and governments in ways that were never thought possible
Businesses need to cultivate their uniqueness
Businesses need to encourage employees to be multi-disciplined, collaborative, and global
Innovation that matters comes from seeing problems differently and adding value quicker than anyone else
Constant reorganization is futile but leaders must look at a company’s structure strategically, consider which pieces need to shift and then unfold change bit by bit
Technology plays a leading role in innovation, but it isn't the only factor
What were once disruptive technologies now are commodities
To innovate, CEO's don’t need to control all the resources or build within their own frameworks. They need to partner and collaborate
Governments can help spur innovation among the private sector
Governments must be more flexible to respond to today's business needs
Restrictive governments try to defend and preserve what has been achieved in the past, but if they rely only on the strength of their past, they put progress in peril
The final afternoon of the Business Leadership Forum focused on the big picture -- of both global political factors and technology. A panel included Karl-Heinz Grasser, Federal Minister of Finance for the Republic of Austria. He spoke about how governments can not only avoid being an obstacle to innovation and growth but also encourage competition thereby creating more jobs.
The panel was bullish about how the information revolution -- ushered in by the microprocessor in the early 1970's and the Internet of the 1990's -- has led to an explosion of new products
and new business models, However, there was a consensus that retaliation from poor economies and over-regulation by some countries could stymie the growth.
Mario Monti, President of Bocconi University and commissioner in the European Union for ten years, was quite optimistic about the EU -- a market of 480 million people -- and said that the EU itself is an innovation. He said that Europe is much more like the U.S. than it was. It is now a single market, has a single currency, and has been expanding market reach around the world. The shortcoming is that Europe, unlike America, does not yet have a constitution. This results in an economic disadvantage because the European community can not make a decision for the total. The European economy is not innovating quickly enough and in fact some countries are protecting the past at the expense of the future. Mario says it is time for "naming and shaming" the laggards through peer reviews. Then he got more specific -- "Germany, France, and Italy are behind on liberalization of service markets and have resisted initiatives to increase competition". These three countries will have a negative impact on the Euro which in turn will hurt the rest of Europe. Mr. Monti's presentation was sobering but hopeful. He said the EU has a lot of good features, that it can protect intellectual property but also move against monopolies such as Microsoft. The key to get innovation going in Europe is for the EU to innovate itself by completing it's constitution.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger kicked off the final segment of the forum, which focused on the future.
IBM supports Linux because it is a great operating system for computers. Irving introduced Linus Torvalds the developer of Linux which he published as a student in 1991. Don Tapscott, a widely acclaimed author, who invented the term "paradigm shift", then moderated the final panel which included Linus,
Nick Donofrio, executive vice president for innovation and technology at IBM, and Ann Mettler, executive director and co-founder of The Lisbon Council. It was a wide-ranging discussion. Linus is an incredibly humble guy. He said he has no vision, just looks 5 cm ahead before each step, and loves to solve technical problems. Linux is successful, he says, because both the development and the decision making are distributed -- a "built-in meritocracy". Don asked why volunteers worked on Linux for no economic return. Linus said, "if you were all engineers, you would not be asking that question". Open source software is viable in most all software areas, with the only exception being niche markets which are too small to get adequate collaboration. "Open source will take over most all infrastructure".
Ann said there is a huge gap between businesses which are moving ahead rapidly and societies which feel left behind. The key problem is that the economy is 70% services but the regulations and governance are still based on an industrial model. She believes that government should learn how to innovate from businesses. "Politicians are clueless about the discussion of the past day and a half". She says that businesses need to share their leanings with society. The labor market in Europe is flat because companies do not want to hire and that is because the laws are so onerous. "You can hire but you can't fire". Labor reform is needed desperately.
Nick says' It' s all about change". IBM is doing a balancing act by supporting both open things and proprietary things. The company is generating a lot of patents but also giving away a lot of patents to move the ball forward in key markets such as healthcare and education. "The world can move ahead faster if the OS is Linux -- it is good enough and a "blow for freedom". A California venture capitalist asked about business ethics and Nick was very aggressive in his response saying it was not optional for companies to be totally and completely ethical in every respect. (Having been at IBM for 38 years, I can say I never ever had a concern about ethics at the company). Nick summarized that anyone can innovate if they are willing to change. "If nothing changes, nothing changes".
Sam wrapped up the conference by saying corporations need to be transparent. Their ultimate responsibility is to create value for the constituencies: stockholders, customers, employees.
He walks the talk.
IBM had some demonstrations set up in the breakout areas at the Auditorium Parco della staffed by researchers and experts in various areas. There was a lot of interest during coffee breaks. After lunch before the final session of the forum got started I had interview with Chris Barger from IBM to talk about the demonstrations and also a few thoughts on the future of healthcare and the Internet. Here is the transcript and here is the podcast.
Following Nakamura-san at the Business Leadership Forum would not be easy but
Sunil Bharti Mittal, CEO of Bharti TeleVentures Limited had quite an amazing story to tell. Bharti is India's leading mobile operator and one of the top five companies in India. Revenue per month per person has shrunk from $30 to $8 and he believes it will go to $3-$4. The good news is that the number of users has gone from 2 million to 90 million. India is a huge consumption economy because there are so many young people -- 50% are under 25. He expects mobile phone users to grow from 90 million to 300+ million by 2009-2010 and his strategy to address the market has been to give away everything except the customer ; i.e. outsource everything except the customer relationship. IT was outsourced to IBM -- a $1 billion contract. Networking was outsourced to Nokia & Ericsson. Call centers were outsourced to an IBM joint venture in India. Mr. Mittal said their growth (1 million new customers per month) could not be achieved without having outsourced to top partners. Complete alignment is achieved and the business model becomes predictable. Innovation in many areas including "Lifetime Validity" where incoming calls are free to customers for life. The theory is simple, if people receive a lot of free inbound calls, they will eventually *make* calls, which are not free. His goal is for his many partners to be happy -- not to laugh but to smile. He hopes to grow from 7 billion minutes per month to 20 billion.
Mr. Yang Mingsheng, President and CEO of the Agricultural Bank of China, was the only speaker who did use English but the simultaneous translation to Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, German, and English allowed all of us to hear what he had to say -- which was a lot. The bank has 500,000 employees and 28,000 branch offices. Although I could not understand a word of what he was saying without the headphones, I could tell that the speaker was very articulate, enthusiastic, and confident. 95% of all bank services are available online. The bank has 400 million depositors, 12.4 million outstanding loans, and 220 million credit cards issued. They have introduced many e-banking and mobile products to their customers. This is being done by centralizing IT infrastructure. Mr. Mingsheng is both a ceo and a member of government. For hobbies he writes poetry and plays the violin. His speech covered every aspect of consumer and business banking services. I don't think a similar presentation by Citigroup or JP Morgan Chase would much if anything that ABC isn't also doing.
Pierluigi Bernasconi, CEO of an Italian electronics retailer called MediaMarket. The company is the No. 1 consumer electronics retailer in Europe with 66 stores in Italy, more than 500 stores in more than a dozen European countries, and a new web-based business in Germany. One of their stores is the largest in the world -- it has six floors of consumer electronics products. Steady growth over the past decade has taken them from $4 to $16 billion. They have taken an innovative business model approach whereby they have two different store brands (MediaMarket and Saturn) that compete with each other. They believe that "self competition" results in better service and price to the consumer. Fifty million people per month spend time in one of their stores. Mr. Bernasconi described an intensely competitive environment in Italy from 4,000 photography shops, 6,000 telephone stores, e-retail sites, hyperStores, and in the future new channels such as Digital Terrestrial TV. In spite of this the company continuously outperforms the competition and gains market share. They have been using the web for sales and communications since 1995. Utilizing advanced IT the company has integrated all their distribution channels. They believe that communication is key and will result in customers thinking of MediaMarket or Saturn as the first choice as a place to get information and subsequently purchase. Their strategy is to exploit multi-channel strategies -- tying together so a person can call from land line or mobile, surf via the web connect via digital terrestrial set top box, or visit in person and all the experiences are recognized and tracked.
Intro to Roman Rendezvous Stories Index to Roman Rendezvous stories
Day two of the Business Leadership Forum at "the auditorium"opened with a big-screen video made for the event by Tom Friedman, author of The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. Less than four hundred years ago, people still thought the world was flat and that ships would "fall off" the globe if they went too far. Then people figured out that the world was round, not flat. Now we are all realizing, thanks to Tom's book, that the world is indeed flat. Tom Friedman totally gets it and tells it very clearly.
1989 marked the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Windows. This was followed by Netscape going public in August 1995 which triggered the dot-com boom
which triggered massive over-investment in fiber optic cable which enabled extremely low cost transfer of information on a global basis. A revolution in web applications enabled collaboration using interoperable standards-based protocols.
These three things flattened the world and brought us from the industrial age to the information age. The end result, Tom says, is that when the world is flat, whatever can be done, will be done.
The only question is "will it be done by you or to you". He says it takes an innovative flare, not vanilla ice cream -- which everybody can make -- but "whipped cream with a cherry on top".
Kunio Nakamura, President of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (otherwise known to most of us as Panasonic) with classic Asian sincerity, paid great homage to IBM for all that his company had learned and how it was supported during a significant transformation. Matsushita was founded in 1918 and now has sales of $75 billion with $3.4 billion in profit and 335,000 employees. Their management philosophy is that the company is a public entity, that the customer comes first, and to start each day anew.
Their largest single product is TV's but it is only 8% of revenue. The company was in crisis condition in 2000, reached the survival level in 2006, and plans to achieve global excellence by 2010. A key element of this comeback is management innovation, a key part of which is using IT to drive productivity. This may seem obvious but Nakamura-san pointed out that culturally productivity was thought of as something that can be nudged by maybe 10%, whereas American companies think of doubling and tripling of productivity. He said Matsushita wants to change from a lead ball to a soccer ball. I have heard many CEO's describe corporate strategies over the years but never have I seen a CEO use the terms "IT" and infrastructure as extensively as Nakamura-san. He outlined how the company plans to invest $1.5B in IT over five years to integrate their procurement, production, distribution, sales & services from material & component suppliers all the way through to customers. He plans to use IBM as the company's innovation partner.
The shuttle buses departing from the Auditorium Parco della Musica each had a sign indicating the language of the onboard tour guide (the entire Business Leadership Forum was simultaneously translated and available to all attendees through headphones in Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, German, and English). The route from the auditorium took us through the Olympic Village which was built for the 1960 Games. The guide on the "English" bus was superb and she pointed out the many architectural features along the route and also the history of Vatican City.
The Vatican is a landlocked enclave in Rome, but it is actually the world's smallest sovereign state (country). Beyond the territorial boundary of Vatican City, the Holy See has authority over twenty-three sites in Rome and five outside of Rome, including the Pope's summer residence at Castel Gandolfo. The Vatican was closed to the public when we arrived. I had been there some years ago along with many thousands of other visitors. It was a unique feeling to be there with a small crowd of five-hundred. Being divided into small groups of a dozen or so made the experience very special -- a lifetime memory for all of us.
The Vatican Library is home for many of the world's rarest books and documents.The library has more than 150,000 manuscripts, including the four oldest surviving manuscripts of the Roman poet Virgil dating from the fourth and fifth century AD; and the oldest known manuscript of the Bible, written in 350 AD. There are also more than a million books, including 8,000 published during the first 50 years of the printing press. Virtually all civilizations and cultures in the history of humanity are represented somewhere in the Vatican Library. The wealth of content is phenomenal and scholars from all over the world are deeply interested in studying it in detail. The result will be an advancement in the general understanding of the history of the world. That is the good news. The bad news is that due to the cost of travel and the physical limitations of the Library to accommodate visiting scholars, only about 2,000 scholars per year can actually visit. Fortunately, a number of technical collaborations have focused on how to both preserve the treasures of the Library and make them more accessible to scholars. IBM developed a digital library service to extend access to portions of the Library's collections to scholars worldwide. (more on the project here).
Walking into an empty Sistine Chapel is hard to describe. The chapel is 135 feet long and 44 feet wide. The paintings are awe inspiring. It took Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (March 6, 1475 – February 18, 1564) four years to create the 68 foot high frescoceiling. Our tour guide happened to be an artist and she herself was in awe of the art and knew an amazing number of details about every aspect of the incredible room. We spent nearly an hour listening and craning our necks to try to absorb what we were seeing. One part of the "creation" panel contains an image that depicts the various parts of the human brain. It has been only recently that the image has been validated as being an accurate depiction. When Michelangelo painted the ceiling in 1512 he certainly had no MRI's or medical texts to refer to.
Cocktails in the courtyard outside of St. Peter's Basilica and dinner in the Braccio Nuovo Gallery at the Vatican were beyond outstanding. The blessing was offered by the president of Vatican City, who is also a cardinal. His eminence then thanked IBM for the digital library project and said it was that generosity that inspired them to make an exception and allow a formal dinner in the Vatican for IBM and the BLF guests. He also reminded Sam that there were still many thousands of manuscripts left to digitize. The outstanding food and wine were accompanied by a string quartet which played a selection of works from the great masters: Bach, Pergolesi, Boccherini, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann. It was an evening to remember forever. Intro to Roman Rendezvous Stories Index to Roman Rendezvous stories
The shuttle buses dropped us off and we walked a few hundred feet through a large courtyard to the Auditorium Parco della Musica. It is quite an impressive place and of the thousands of "auditoriums" in the world, only this one has the url of http://www.auditorium.com. The "city of music" lies outside of Rome's densely-packed historic center where such a facility could never have been built. Four hundred trees surround the beautiful buildings where 3,000 spectators can enjoy concerts of all kinds -- from classical to jazz and rock.
IBM hosted it's fourth Business Leadership Forum at "the auditorium" earlier this month, and it was attended by several hundred of "the world's leading thinkers from across business, industry, government and academia", representing more than 50 countries. The forum facilitated two days of discussion about innovation and the challenges facing businesses in the 21st century.
IBM Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano kicked off the meeting by saying that innovation is not optional for the leading institutions of the world -- businesses, schools, hospitals, and governments. "The bottom line of all this is that innovation is really a 'must do' unless we want to live in an environment that's commoditized and not unique, not differentiated". Sam's point was that if organizations focus only on taking out costs, they will be doomed with very low profits if not extinction. Everyone agrees that Innovation starts at the top and Sam practices what he preaches -- not just by innovating in technologies (IBM turning out more patents year after year than any company in the world), but by innovating in strategies and business models. For example, it was Sam who led the charge to transform IBM from a hardware company to a hardware, software and services company. Especially the latter, when he acquired Price Waterhouse Consulting and smoothly integrated it into the IBM portfolio of services. He also led the sale of the PC business. Some people viewed it as simply a "sale" but in reality it was a highly innovative change to the IBM business model -- selling off a low margin business but retaining the services aspect of it and at the same time gaining a stronger foothold in the Chinese market opportunity.
Sam then introduced Lord Brown, group chief executive at bp. The company had more than $20billion in profits for 2005 and is moving to even bigger numbers in 2006. Lord Brown described many innovative aspects of the company but I was most impressed with how they are using computer simulation to continuously increase the amount of oil they are able to extract from their drillings. He also described ambitious goals to put the hydrocarbon pollutants that come out with the oil back into where the oil was extracted, thereby reducing global pollution.
At the end of day we all got back in the shuttles to head to the Vatican.
I was anxious to get going so I quickly selected three geocaches that were closest to the hotel -- Forum's Revival, Coliseum, and Circus Maximus -- downloaded the latitudes and longitudes into the MagellaneXplorist GPS and hit the street. It would have been much better if I had done some better planning, reviewed the logs of others who had found the caches, and selected caches that had maximum odds of me finding them. As they say, haste makes waste.
No map in hand, I headed down the Via Veneto toward the Forum following the arrow on the GPS. I was so confident there would be plenty of time that I stopped along the way at a small sidewalk cafe called Berzitello's and enjoyed a plate of spaghetti. From there I meandered from street to street following the arrow until I reached the Forum. The IBM Business Leadership Forum focused on "Innovation that Matters". The Roman Forum obvioiusly focused on innovative structures -- especially impressive considering that many of them are nearly two thousand years old. It is a marvel that they were constructed.
After taking a few false entries I finally got to the spot -- or so said the GPS. There were a number of logical hiding places within twenty feet of the waypoint and I searched many of them. After more than a half-hour I gave up and headed for the Coliseum. At least I would find the other two caches. The Coliseum is an enormous place and there were thousands of people touring the ruins. The eXplorist said the cache was just 300 feet away. Sounds simple, but with the huge circumference and multiple levels of the Coliseum, it was not at all clear where the cache might be. If you are an experienced geocacher, you know what I mean. Sometimes you are a few hundred feet away but there is a river with no bridge in between. After an unplanned tour of most of the Coliseum, I found the spot, but not the cache. The latitude/longitude) was near a meadow and a wall just a couple of hundred feet from the main entrance to the Coliseum. After a half hour, I reluctantly gave up. Sound familiar? Well, at least I will find one of the three. Off to walk to the Circus Maximus.
This one should be easy, I told myself. Out in the open, nothing tricky about it. I got to the exact spot and searched high and low. Empty handed again. The good news is that I logged quite a few miles of walking on a sunny day. The weather was perfect. After meandering through the streets of Rome back to the Via Veneto and the hotel, I went straight to geocaching.com and read the logs of people who had found (or attempted to find) the three caches. If only I had done that *before* the search. It was tempting to head out again but the day was late and the miles of walking were enough -- and I had a plan for the morning.
Since I knew exactly where to go I knew I could hire a taxi for an hour, get to all three cache locations, and still get back in time for the opening of the Business Leadership Forum. Forum's Revival was still no piece of cake but I was able to find it in less than ten minutes. I signed the logbook, removed a travel bug, hid the tupperware container back in it's place, and headed back to the taxi. At the Coliseum, I went to the exact same spot as the afternoon before and recognized all the clues from the logs -- but still could not find it -- a big dissappointment. On to Circus Maximus to look for the microcache. Traditional caches are in tupperware containers or ammo cans. Microcaches are much harder to find -- they are usually black 35mm film containers -- easy to hide in a very small place, in this case in a three-foot high wall behind a loose stone. With two out of three finds, I declared victory, headed for the hotel, put on a tie and took a shuttle to the Auditorium Parco della Musica where Sam Palmisano kicked off the day.
As usual, I apologize for being a poor photographer, but I do have quite a few pictures to share here on flickr.
Short stories are usually better than long stories but this past week contained so much to share that it can not be told in one short story. The highlight was when five-hundred of us entered the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel in a rare way -- the buildings had been closed to the public and were empty -- and then even more rare was having dinner in the Braccio Nuovo Gallery of the Vatican Museum. The Business Leadership Forum was led by Sam Palmissano, chairman of IBM and it focused on "Innovation That Matters".
Just about every company these days talks about innovation but IBM is actually walking the talk -- and innovating in innovative ways and on a global basis. CEO's at the forum from around the world talked about how their companies were breaking new ground and setting new records by innovating with IBM. During coffee and lunch breaks at the rapid-fire day-and-a-half forum there were demonstrations of technology that can make the world a better place by using RFID (radio frequency identification tags) to track the movement of cargo containers and hospital patients. With incredible humility, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux talked about the past and future of open source software development. The week even allowed a few geocaching trips on arrival day. The link below provides an index to the stories about what I learned this week.
The month of March was cold in many places but another hot one for IBM. There was a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives -- including the 2005 annual report and collaboration with gaming companies. Here are the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
The central theme at the IBM Open Source IT Analyst Conference in Stamford, Connecticut this week revolved around the word "open". The term is used with "open source" and also with "open standards" and there is often confusion about the meaning of the two terms. A standard is like a blueprint. An open standard is one that is freely available. Open source is software that is freely available and which may implement open standards. The two terms are independent.
At one extreme, open means you can take my idea and do whatever you want with it and you don't even have to tell me you did so. At the other extreme, closed means my idea is mine and you can not use it or even see it. In a practical sense there is a wide spectrum in between open and closed. There are many factors in the debate but long term it is breakaway innovation among communities of developers and inventors that share a common vision that is the most important argument in favor of the expansion of open source software. The downside for entrenched monopolies or those resistant to change is that open source can cause disruption and a ton of incremental competition in markets. IBM's Dr. Bob Sutor, vp for standards and open source, says "tough". Only the greatest sinners of the past can truly repent.
The most visible example of the open standards debate is what is going on in Massachusetts. (see prior story). Some people are calling the state's decision to separate data formats from applications a "Bill of Rights" around information. A gentleman from Boston University told me he not only is confident the decision will stick but that it will be a model for the free world. A Norwegian official said that proprietary data will no longer be acceptable. It is a struggle against existing ways of doing things but long term there are huge benefits for all of us if open document forms proliferate resulting in consistent, error-free, structured ways of doing things. Electronic physician notes about our healthcare would be a good example. IBM has targeted healthcare and education as two industries that can benefit from open documents and the company is opening up it's intellectual property treasure trove to help enable these two industries to make a quantum leap.
What about patents? Similar to open vs. closed, patents are not all good or all bad. It is quite impressive to see how IBM has been able to balance it's proprietary products and it's open source solutions. They are building proprietary code and innovation on top of the open source base. At the same time they are giving patents away that have the potential to accelerate the quality of healthcare and education. In parallel they are leading an effort to improve the quality and integrity of the patent process that all companies use. The patent process has been like the jury system -- not perfect but nobody has come up with a better way. In the case of the patent system, while many companies complain about the system, IBM is taking the lead to do something about it.
The month of February was cold in many places but hot for IBM. There was a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. Here are the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
Today I attended the IBM Open Source Analyst Briefing which was held at the Marriott in Stamford, Connecticut. I will post a story about what I learned later but first I would like to share something about the Marriott. The hotel had a "Wired-for-Business" connectivity offer which enables guests to "Work smarter with unlimited..." in-room high-speed Internet access plus local and long distance phone calls. The cost is $9.95 per day. Not bad compared to many places. For me, using EV-DO is much better. I am already paying a monthly fee for it and it works more or less everywhere -- but I have to admit it is expensive. I suspect many guests do not have EV-DO and may not want the WiFi offering. They will be confronted with $1.00 for the first 30 minutes of a local call, MCI "daytime operator assisted" rate plus 55% hotel surcharge for long distance plus a "connection charge" of $4.99 for each U.S. long distance call and $9.00 for each "International" call. This is one of many examples of companies exploiting those who are part of a declining market for old-fashioned services. Why would anyone pay $4.99 plus $1.00 for a call that they could make on their cell phone -- probably within their covered minutes. As for international calling, there are many choices including Skype and my people which allows you to transfer from a cell phone to your home and then to a VoIP connection to Europe for less than ten cents per minute. Disintermediation is happening all over the place. Next time you need to call 411, try 800-FREE-411 instead.
"Intellectual Property" has been behind the scenes in years past but has now become a front and center issue. Some argue "IP" is what makes the world go round and is a great American strength and some argue that anything anything anyone invents should belong to everyone. I believe most would agree that the truth is somewhere in between. If a company spends millions of dollars on capital equipment they should be able to expect to get a return on the things they invent as a result of the investment without fearing that another company will take the invention and profit by producing the product with no development investment. At the other extreme if someone gets a patent for "e-commerce involving left-handed people who buy things online on Tuesday afternoons", most people would agree that this is an abuse of the patent concept and it surely doesn't represent "Intellectual Property". Most of the IP world is somewhere in between these extremes and the issues are diverse and complicated.
The largest patent producer in the world (for well over a decade) is IBM Corporation and it seems reasonable for the company to take a point of view on the subject of "IP". To widely share their views, IBM has launched a new podcast series, "The New Intellectual Property (IP) Marketplace," which is now airing on ibm.com The first episode in the series features my former colleague Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM vice president of technology strategy and innovation. Dr. Wladawsky-Berger (he goes by Irving) explains the importance of patent quality and how the ability to share ideas stimulates innovation. He also gets into some of the heavier issues such as transparency, integrity, and mechanisms for establishing fair prices for IP..
I look forward to the future episodes of the series. In the meantime, I can highly recommend Irving's blog.
Pandemic viruses are one of the most threatening things that most of us can contemplate. Fortunately, some big guns are aimed at the potential problem. The Scripps Research Institute and IBM have announced a new collaboration called "Check-mate" which will capitalize on Scripps Research's world class research in biochemical modeling and drug discovery and IBM's expertise in computational biology and supercomputing. The joint research team will use IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer, the world's fastest supercomputer to simulate how the potential pandemic virus ticks and devise models of containment.
The joint team will leverage their expertise in bioinformatics, structural biology, life sciences, functional genomics, systems biology, and medical informatics to accelerate an understanding of infectious diseases such as Avian Influenza. Rather than wait for a crisis and then try to figure out what happened, the team will build digital representations of these complex viruses pro-actively. The initial efforts will focus on the genetic variations of the viruses and potential methodologies to anticipate and contain the disease. Hopefully, the result will be an improved way to fight pandemic viruses before they become a plague -- "Checkmate".
The new year got off to a fast start for IBM. There was a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. There have been forty or so acquistions in the past five years. An interesting contract was landed to assist the State of Arizona in developing and implementing a statewide system for voter registration. Here are the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
On February7 we will be discussing Computational Biology at Demo. No doubt we will hear about some potential breakthroughs in healthcare. One thing we know for sure is that new healthcare solutions are costly. How will people afford them? There are many issues associated with this and one of them is the fraud that occurs in today's system. IBM has been working on this area for years and recently introduced their solution in Rockland County, New York. The
IBM Verify New York Medicaid claims management program has identified $13M in potentially improper Medicaid billing in just 10% of the cases in just one
county in just one state.
For a modest software and consulting fee, IBM used it's powerful supercomputers to do a sophisticated statistical analysis of the billing from the top 10% of Medicaid reimbursed pharmacies and general practice doctors in the county during a 21-month
period. Seems like a good target since
New York's Medicaid program is the largest in the US, with an annual cost of $44.5 billion -- and rising fast. Rockland County has more than 41,000 residents who use Medicaid and the county spends about $384 million a year on their care. Initial estimates are that as much as $13 million of the billing may be improper. If this turns out to be the case, the nationwide numbers are in the $billions for sure. The IBM system uses thousands of queries to look for anomalies such as suspiciously large numbers of bills for services on a single day, repetitive or duplicate billing or unusually expensive services. Forty-two percent of the ten percent in Rockland County appeared to have discrepancies.
The project doesn't mean that providers are automatically guilty nor that the money can be quickly recovered but at least it shows the investigators where to look. They have always had the data but with help from IBM they now have the tools. There are obstacles. In New York, the counties are responsible for Medicare but they are not allowed to take action against fraud. Only the state can do that -- but they haven't. The IBM program enables the counties to provide very specific information to the state and press for action to reduce fraud.
Monday, December 19, 2005
The Internet Division
In the "old days" -- ten years ago -- we used to say that a month was three or four Internet months or that a year was three or four Internet years. It was a way of expressing how fast things were moving. Now that it has been ten years since the Internet Division was started at IBM (and four years since my e-tirement began) it seems appropriate to reflect on those early days. My colleague Irving Wladawsky-Berger posted a nice story of his recollections of the formation of the division and my goal here is to complement his posting with some of my thoughts.
Before getting into the history, I must say how proud I am to see how ibm.com has evolved from a small computer under the desk at IBM Headquarters in Armonk to a global powerhouse of a communications medium. I can't say that I foresaw even a fraction of the amazing capabilities of the Internet but one thing I was sure of -- it was an amazing breakthrough in how to communicate with people both inside and outside of the company.
It was May 24, 1994 when ibm.com came to life after a lot of hard work by my colleagues. (take a look at an ibm.com page from 1996). The history of the effort has been reported in a number of magazines and books, including a story in the Harvard Business Review. The effort was inspired, in part, by a paper called "Get Connected" which I wrote in late 1993. The concepts described in the paper seem very primitive now, but at the time most people thought they were revolutionary or radical or even weird.
There were many firsts on ibm.com. It was not the first website but it was a very early pioneer in the commercial exploitation of the web. It was first to have a CEO give an audio message on the homepage, first of the top largest companies in the world to put it's annual report on the web and provide an online employment application form. Back in those days Microsoft was saying that the web would not amount to much because it was too slow and too insecure. There were many "heroes" in the pioneering days of Internet technology at IBM and I was privileged to be part of the group. There was a grassroots knowledge of the Internet in the company and I became the "spiritual leader" that helped them to be heard. Irving was the executive who enabled me to be heard. Last month Irving and I spent a morning being interviewed by some of the ibm.com team on our opinions about the subject of innovation. A video of the interviews and podcast are posted here. And now for a bit of the history. (read more)
The new Lenovo Z60 Widescreen ThinkPad is getting high marks. The company has developed a clever website to allow people to "vote" for which model they like better -- the one with the black case or the one with the titanium case. If you are not sure which to vote for, just listen to the Persuadatron! The wide-screen ThinkPad Z60 series offers a 15.4 inch widescreen and built in EV-DO wireless.
The EV-DO feature provides wireless broadband in locations where there is no WiFi. It works very well in trains and cars. Currently Verizon Wireless is the leading provider for EV-DO coverage, with more than sixty major cities. Sprint is rolling out coverage to compete. EV-DO has numerous advantages over WiFi -- the main one being seamless roaming across the country since the signal travels on same cell sites as cell phones. One disadvantage of EV-DO has been the need for an expensive card to plug into your laptop. Now with the Z60 it is built in -- in addition to having WiFi.
The month of November was another incredibly busy month for IBM, with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives including one help find a cure for cancer. There have eight acquisitions year-to-date, thirty-five in the past five years, and forty-eight in the past ten years. Here are the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
In 1980, while serving as branch manager for IBM in Philadelphia, I had the occasion to visit a senior executive at one of our customers -- The Campbell Soup Company in Camden, New Jersey. I don't remember who I met with or what we talked about but I will never forget the executive's secretary who was sitting at her small desk in the executive's office. This is how it was for all the executive secretaries at the company. I thought it was a bit strange then and increasingly over the years thought even the term "secretary" was outdated. Over the last twenty-five years the title has mostly been replaced by "administrative assistant". In some companies they call the role "admin". Whatever you call them, their responsibilities have changed dramatically.
In the early days a secretary might take dictation, type letters, arrange the bosses desk, and pour coffee - even make coffee. Today's administrative assistant performs information research and retrieval, plans and books travel, collaborates with colleagues to optimize the use of their principal's time, anticipates the needs of those they support, handles inquiries from inside and outside of the company, prepares presentation materials, and takes online courses to improve their skills. That is just a sampling. Administrative assistants are invaluable assets that leverage the scarce resources of the organization they are part of. These are just a few of the reasons that I have always had the greatest respect for administrative assistants.
Once a year I am privileged to spend an hour in an interview with Lillian Davis who is responsible for Site Administrative Services at IBM in Austin, Texas. That is her day job but she also serves as the doyen of the Senior Administrative Council. This group of 100+ administrative assistants from all parts of IBM serve as the thought leaders for thousands of other assistants and they share their expertise as well as make suggestions to the company for improved procedures. Aside from all that, when you hear Lillian on this podcast you will think she is a major network news anchor.
As discussed here many times, grass roots movements such as the Internet and Linux are hard to stop. However, one of the impediments to very fast adoption of Linux as compared to just the fast adoption that is taking place has been the underlying threat of legal action to a user or vendor of Linux by a patent holder.
The concept is simple, but potentially brilliant. OIN, using the funding provided by the founding companies, will purchase Linux related patents in the open market. It will then offer them on a royalty free basis to any individual or company member that agrees not to sue the other members. OIN is starting out with a set of electronic commerce patents that were purchased
from business-to-business (B2B) software pioneer Commerce One. More purchases will follow and likely the purchases will spur even more innovation for systems and applications that leverage Linux.
OIN will have no income since it will seek no royalties from it's patent portfolio, so how do the founders make a return on their investment
in OIN? Through the accelerated adoption of Linux which in turn opens the door for more sales of hardware, sofware, and services. Much of the IT industry and it's customers will embrace the OIN move -- with the exception of
Microsoft which has argued that relying on "open
source" software poses legal risks.
Market researcher IDC estimates that the worldwide Linux business will grow 25.9 percent
annually, doubling from $20 billion this year to more than $40 billion by 2008. If OIN is successful the growth rate could be even higher.
Google the word "nano" and you get nearly 70 million results -- ranging from the iPod Nano to nano tennis rackets, to some very esoteric and futuristic concepts. Nanotechnology is a relatively new field involving engineering on a scale of individual atoms. The technology will surely result in new materials and also the improvement of existing materials. Uses of the new materials will range from new medical devices to incredible car paint to stronger and lighter sporting equipment. In fact Kevin Maney at USA Today reported that nanotech will eventually make better-performing yacht racing masts, hockey sticks, vaulting poles, softball bats, golf clubs and tennis rackets. He says the technology will help make lighter racing bikes and race cars and even make a golf ball go straighter based on the physics of the material it is made from.
Not that sports are not important, but IBM has some much bigger ideas. Last week I visited the IBM Research Nanoscience Department at the TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York -- a nice half-hour motorcycle ride along the reservoirs of Westchester County. In the same building is the second most powerful computer in the world (IBM also built the most powerful one which is installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and has built more than half of the 500 most powerful computers in the world).
The reason IBM is investing millions of dollars in nanotechnology is that it wants to make sure that it will have the fastest computers in the world twenty years from now. Today's computers are built using silicon chips which are manufactured using a chemical process that has been constantly refined over the past forty years. Progress has been exponential but the end of the runway is in sight. Although various creative techniques are enabling continued improvements in speed, a new approach is needed fairly soon. Enter carbon nanotubes.
Carbon nanotubes are unique structures with remarkable electronic and mechanical properties. An ideal nanotube can be thought of as a hexagonal network of carbon atoms that forms a hollow cylinder. The nanotubes are "made" using a vapor deposition process in an extremely hot gas furnace. The nanotube model I saw at IBM looked like something my grandchildren would build with LEGOs. The real nanotubes are extremely thin -- their diameter is about 10,000 times smaller than a human hair! Needless to say, you can't see the nanotubes with the human eye and hence, the scanning tunneling microscopes (invented by Heinrich Rohrer and Gerd K. Binnig at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland for which they were awarded a Nobel prize) is a key tool for the researchers.
It was exciting to walk into one of IBM's nanoscience laboratories. The equipment in the small room was breathtaking -- millions of dollars worth of plumbing, cabling, tubing, tanks of gasses, and computers everywhere. It was an awesome feeling to be in a room where work is being done at the molecular level. I actually saw a demonstration of a nanotube switch turn on and off. On and off means ones and zeroes and the speed of the chips made from this technology will make today's chips look like slow pokes.
The most impressive part of the visit was the two young scientists who described and demonstrated the nano technology. They were highly impressive and enthusiastic about their work and dedicated to solving the key problems that will be occurring fifteen to twenty years from now. I asked them whether they were from a chemistry, physics, or electrical engineering background. Their answer was yes. The whole experience gave me goose bumps, especially knowing that there are thousands more like them at IBM's research labs around the world.
The Nanotube Site -- site with many links to sites dedicated to nanotubes
The month of October was incredibly busy for IBM, with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. Here are the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
The month of September was really busy for IBM, with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services and corporate initiatives. Here are the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has decided that all state departments and organizations should use open standards for their documents. Specifically, the open standard to be backed by the Commonwealth is OpenDocument. The OpenDocument standard, developed by OASIS, is short for the "OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications". It is a file format for saving documents such as spreadsheets, memos, or presentations. The idea is simple -- to have a royalty-free, XML-based file format that any office or personal productivity program can work with and which will allow users to exchange the files with no concern that another user won't be able to read the files. What's not to like about that? Nothing that I can think of.
We have all experienced the frustration of receiving a spreadsheet or text document but then couldn't open, read, or print it. Wouldn't it be nice to have globally compatible documents that would work equally well with mainframes, Macs, PC's, Windows, Linux, handheld devices, etc.?
There is only one opponent of the idea -- Microsoft, which says that it has no plans to support OpenDocument. Microsoft also says it plans an XML approach for documents in the next release of MS Office and that it will be superior to OpenDocument.
It likely will be superior. Excel is superior to the OpenOffice spreadsheet (although PC Magazine just gave OpenOffice a very positive review - see Office Software On The Cheap). A company with the resources of Microsoft can bury us in features. What percentage of the features of MS Office are used by the average user? Five percent? Fifty percent would surely be high. There are two questions. Do standards matter? Does the "superior" feature-set that MS Office provides matter? My theory for office and personal productivity documents is "Just enough Is Good Enough" -- in other words, having a standard document format that works on any kind of computer in the world is much more important than having some esoteric features that the vast majority of users will never take advantage of and which are proprietary to one company.
IBM learned this lesson the hard way. In the mid-1980's the United States government began to issue requests for proposals which included a restriction that any proposed solution must operate on Unix. At the time, Unix was not used much in the corporate world where IBM gained most of it's business so the company ignored the RFP's that required Unix. The government argued that Unix was going to be the standard for all government IT and that it was important because all agencies and departments could more easily share software and data. IBM argued that it's mainframe solutions were more robust, more scaleable, and easier to manage. After losing a lot of government business, IBM started taking Unix seriously and introduced AIX which went on to become very prevalent in not only government but also in financial services and other corporate sectors. IBM saw the light and began a transformation toward open industry standards and today is a model for leadership in Linux (the most popular flavor of Unix) and in collaborative innovation (see Irving's blog).
What's wrong with Microsoft providing XML support for MS Office documents? Nothing per se -- the devil is in the details. It is very easy to bury some proprietary features and functions in XML. With OpenDocument, the full specification for the format of the document is in public view. No guessing and no surprises. (All 706 pages of what OpenDocument is and how it works is here).
The month of August is slow in some parts of the world but for IBM, it was anything but slow. Here are the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
The folks at IBM tell me that readership at the Mainframe Blog is growing. This is not surprising. There are a lot of us "old timers" out there that have fond memories and many people around the world who are using, developing, extending, exploiting, and loving mainframes. You might say it is somewhat of a cult. The initial posts at the Mainframe Blog have been by current or formers IBMers, but knowing IBM's passion for collaborative innovation, it would not surprise me to see the blog opened up over time to a wide variety of points of view across the industry and customer base.
We all have our favorite mainframes. For many it will surely be the new and sophisticated mainframe Z9. For me there are four mainframes that standout among my memories. First was the GE 225 at Lehigh University where I was an electrical engineering student (1963-1967). The programming language used was called WIZ and it was very similar to BASIC. Programs were literally written on paper and then punched into "IBM Cards" using a keypunch. The deck of cards was then "submitted" through a plastic window. Hours later (sometimes days) the results of the program, known as a "printout" were placed in bins where students could pick them up.
I was fortunate to be able to go to graduate school at the University of South Florida part time while I was serving in the U.S. Army at the U.S. STRIKE Command in Tampa, Florida (STRIKE stood for swift tactical retaliation in any known environment). My masters thesis was in operations research and GPSS was the programming language I used to build simulation models. Like using the GE 225, programs were created on punched cards and submitted through a window -- this time to an IBM System 360 Model 65. The model 65 was a giant of computing at the time -- many times faster than the GE 225. Mainframe #3 is one I got to know up close and personal. (read more)
A little more than five years ago (see "in the news") IBM announced that it would begin installing and supporting the Linux operating system on its mainframe computers. A lot has happened with Linux and with mainframes since then, but first of all, what is a mainframe? Is it a "main" frame, a main "frame", or something else? The wikipedia offers a history and perspective on mainframes, but my recollection is slightly different. IBM computers used to be constructed in steel "frames" that would fill a large building -- and required a lot of plumbing to provide the circulating water to keep them from overheating. In one of the frames was a "console" -- think of it like the keyboard of a PC -- which provided many dials and switches -- like an airliner cockpit -- that enabled the "system operator" to control the computer and tell it what to do. That particular frame was the "main frame".
Today's most sophisticated mainframe, the Z9, stands a mere 6 feet 4 inches tall, weighs 3,836 lbs, and occupies a footprint of 27 square feet. I was in the room at the Hotel W last month when the Z9 was announced. It was quite impressive to see the sleek space-age system on stage with the power to replace thousands of separate servers. More than a billion dollars was invested in the engineering and development of the machine.
People have talked about the death of the mainframe for years but after seeing the Z9, you can be sure they are not going away for a very long time. In addition to the Z9, IBM announced an extension of it's incredibly powerful virtualization engine software. The combination of the new mainframe and the new software will make it possible to turn a real datacenter into a virtual datacenter. This is a really big deal. CEO's, CIO's, and CFO's are making plans to consolidate their datacenters using the new combo because virtual datacenters require fewer people, offer more reliability, and are much less costly to operate. Sounds good, but what is a datacenter and what is a virtual datacenter? (read more)
The month of July was a hot one for much of the country and also at IBM, with technology and solutions annuncements and acquisitions across the board. Here are the announcements made by the company during the month. It was very exciting to be in New York this week for the announcement of IBM's new Z9 mainframe computing system. As I was looking at it on the stage, I was wondering how many buildings it would have taken in 1967, when I joined IBM, to house an equivalent amount of processing power. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
The month of June was a busy one at IBM, with technology and solutions annuncements across the board. Here are the announcements made by the company in June. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
The month of May contained some a lot of interesting news and it looks like it will be another very busy year for IBM. One of the biggest items was the closing of the Lenovo transaction. They are off and running. The new ThinkPad T43p is awesome. Here are the announcements made by the company in May. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
A Google search on the word outsourcing produces more than 33 million results. After reading the story about the Nortel/IBM contract, it got me thinking about what outsourcing is all about and where it is headed. The aim of this short story is to offer a perspective on the past, present, and future of outsourcing.
Outsourcing used to be simple. Rather than hire employees to clean the office building, many companies decided to hire a cleaning company to do it. The cleaning company specialized in cleaning ,had experienced people, and could manage the cleaning operations better than a company could do themselves. The concept spread to the mailroom, overall building maintenance, and other functions of business. One of the largest targets of opportunity became information technology -- hiring someone else to manage the computers and people.
In the sixties, IBM thought IT outsourcing was a really bad idea. However, some large customers concluded that if they outsourced their computer operations to a "datacenter company" they could save money. The theory was that the outsourcing company had a larger number of mainframe computers and therefore a lower unit cost for computing. IBM did not like this because it was perceived at the time that it would result in selling less computers. One of the outsourcing companies was Shared Medical Systems in Philadelphia (now part of Siemens Medical Systems) when I was the IBM branch manager there. SMS was buying a lot of new IBM computers but hospitals around the country were returning computers they had been renting from IBM to use SMS instead. At the time companies like SMS were considered by IBM to be competitors. (read more)
I first met Irving Wladawsky-Berger sometime in 1992. I was impressed with his keen interest in technology and the things I was working on. We have continued as friends and colleagues ever since. Irving has had a distinguished career at IBM including heading up the IT group in IBM Research, getting IBM into the supercomputer business, managing IBM's UNIX systems business, starting the Internet division, leading the charge with Linux, and now focusing on the new area of collaborative innovation. All of these important assignments have been intellectually challenging and not surprisingly, Irving has always been up to the challenge.
My first experience working with Irving was when he asked me some questions about the ThinkPad. No matter how technical an issue may have been, Irving got it instantly. In the early days many people had difficulty grasping the significance of the Web. Not Irving. With every new idea presented by anyone, Irving has always had an uncanny ability to see the implications even beyond the person with the idea. My ten years working with him were certainly the most rewarding of my 38 years at IBM. When I e-tired, Irving wrote a nice letter.
More recently, Irving has started up a new blog to focus on his interests in various aspects of information technology including the Internet, servers and supercomputing, standards and open source initiatives like Linux, the evolution to Web services, and content management. Irving has always been interested in public policy issues and I am sure he will be writing about key issues in health care and education, support for R&D, intellectual property, and other areas.
In addition to Irving's depth in business and science, he is also a delightful person to know. Born in Cuba, Irving has not only supported diversity efforts but has taken time personally to mentor numerous high potential people in the company. I also have no doubts that Irving's love of baseball will find a place in his blog. I for one look forward to reading his future postings. I have placed a link in my blogroll and also subscribed to his RSS feed in the new Opera 8 browser.
April was a busy beginning for the second quarter at IBM. Here are the IBM announcements for April. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
March was a busy month for IBM. Here are the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here. I was particularly pleased to see the new acquisitions as well as the approval of the Lenovo-IBM deal.
I have to admit that I have been talking a lot about Linux lately. On February 16 the LinuxWorld Conference was held in Boston and I was fortunate to be a speaker there as I previously discussed. An interview entitled "It's About Freedom" was published in Linux Executive Report and distributed at the conference. It summarizes my thoughts about Linux pretty well.
One month later, this past Sunday, the COMMON Conference was held in Chicago and I reiterated some of the same points. The conference was a bit smaller (2,000 vs. 8,000) attendees, but nevertheless an very enthusiastic audience of 1,200 was on hand. COMMON attendees are users of IBM's iSeries eServers. Most people in the world never heard of "iSeries" but there are hundreds of thousands of them out there serving the needs of small and medium businesses and distributed locations of very large businesses. The Chief Information Officers of companies using the iSeries are passionate about the speed, flexibility, security, and reliability of the systems. IBM attends the COMMON conference but doesn't need to extol the iSeries virtues because the IBM customers do it for them.
Tomorrow night I will be speaking at the Society for Information Management - Fairfield/Westchester branch in Stamford, Connecticut.
From
iSeries "News Wire Daily"...
Out of Context: Penguin Power
"Linux is not about "free" — it's about freedom. There will be a lot of studies coming out saying Windows is cheaper or Linux is cheaper. I don't know which is cheaper, but I know which is better. ... Ultimately, Linux is going to be the most secure."— John Patrick, COMMON keynote speaker
Based on the positive feedback about the "IBM Happenings", I will continue to post them during 2005. January started out with some interesting news and it looks like it will be another very busy year for the company.Here are the IBM announcements for January. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
The United States granted the first patent to Samuel Hopkins of Pittsford, Vermont in 1790. Mr. Hopkin's idea had to do with making potash which in turn was used in making glass and in various industrial processes.Two other major patents granted the same year were related to making candles and milling flour. On January 11, 2005 the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced that for the twelfth consecutive year, IBM received more patents -- 3,248 -- than any other private sector organization in America. No company, other than IBM, has yet been granted 2,000 patents in any year while IBM has exceeded 3,000 four years in a row. Potentially more significant than the 3,248 new patents is the fact that on the same day as the USPTO announcement, IBM gave away 500 patents. Not literally. The company pledged to offer open access to key innovations covered by 500 of it's U.S. software patents. There is one catch.
The pledge is applicable only to individuals, communities, or companies working on or using software that meets the Open Source Initiative (OSI) definition of "open source" software. Some people think open source means "free". Not so. There are specific criteria that OSI defines but from a layman perspective it means that the instructions in the software that tell computers what to do are made explicit -- put into the public view so that everyone can see exactly how the software works. There are many advantages to this. For example, if a company finds a bug in Linux, they can fix it and contribute their fix to all the other users of Linux. This is unlike Windows, where if you discover a bug you have to wait for Microsoft to fix it. Their priority in fixing a bug may not be the same as yours. With open source software you can set your own priorities and you are not dependent on one company. The patents that IBM is making available are not something that an individual will likely use but indirectly all of us may be beneficiaries. This is because the OSI approved projects include Apache (used by most Web servers) and OpenOffice (used by me and by millions instead of MS Office). Software such as this may be enhanced using some of the innovations in the 500 patents from IBM. The company has also made it clear that there will be more IBM patents to become available.
The patent pledge is a major shift in the way IBM manages and its intellectual property portfolio. Surely they will continue to invent things in IBM Research laboratories but in addition they are launching an initiative called "collaborative innovation". The idea is to form an industry-wide "patent commons" in which patents are used to spread new ideas more rapidly to both developers and users. Some of the most significant technological advances are based on open standards (in the public eye like open source software) and shared knowledge and experience. Probably the best example of this I can think of is the Internet. IBM's new move may lead to important breakthroughs as IBM challenges
other companies to follow suit in deploying their intellectual
property portfolios for more than just legal or financial self-interest.
There was
quite a bit of feedback about the IBM Happenings. Thanks to all for that. Several people said they especially liked the "headlines" so they choose to read the details or not. December was another busy month. Here are the announcements made by the company. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
I was particularly interested in the announcement about "Lenovo to acquire IBM Personal Computing Division " and wrote a couple of stories about it. They are both in the IBM category of the blog.
Sorry I am a bit late with the IBM Happenings posting for November. I would appreciate any feedback from readers as to whether these news postings are useful. It is not a huge effort to pull them together -- but not trivial either. As usual, there was a lot going on at IBM during the past month (November). Here are the announcements made by the company. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
From the feedback I have gotten to "ThinkPad Futures",
it sounds like a lot of people are happy that the ThinkPad lives on after the Lenovo acquisition. While there is a large community of individual ThinkPad customers out there, most ThinkPad users are employees of the major enterprises of the world. That has been the primary target of IBM and will continue to be at Lenovo. Enterprise customers are much more demanding than the average consumer. They expect industrial strength, global service and support, bullet-proof security features (like the new ThinkPad built-in biometric fingerprint reader), and ease of integration with corporate networks. Enterprises buy ThinkPads because their employees like them but also because of the ThinkVantage technologies. I have to admit a partiality to IBM on this subject but I think there is good reason for that feeling. (read more)
An IBM colleague from years past, Craig Fellenstein, has been helping out with a significant initiative called the IT Leadership Academy. The program is sponsored by the Governor of Connecticut and is designed to bring 180 public High School students together to work on IT related projects during the school year. The participating high schools include both suburban and urban. The host for the sessions this year is IBM Corporation. I was fortunate to be guest speaker this morning.
Michael Mino is the director of the IT Leadership Academy and has organized the program. The students selected have been identified as leaders and I was very impressed with their knowledge and interest. The students asked poignant questions about WiFi, security, spam, and other pertinent topics. They are clearly on top of what the key issues are. After I described what is going on in Philadelphia with the lead telecommunications company pushing for restrictions on the city's ability to offer WiFi to the citizens at large, one student asked how this could be. He was dumbfounded. So am I.
P.S. Craig is quite an accomplished author. His grid computing book is the best on the sujbect.
In 1992 I was fortunate to have an assignment in IBM's personal systems group. I had been CFO in the computer integrated manufacturing unit of IBM just prior to that and was quite happy with what I was doing. However, a friend of mine, who was #2 guy in the personal systems group at the time, knew of my passion for personal computing and he convinced me to take a marketing role in the group. I was a newcomer at marketing but I had a great appreciation for the importance of having good names for things. We were looking for an "independent" sounding name for a newly formed PC division that had aggressive plans to become a major player in the corporate market. We decided on the "IBM PC Company". The organization was fast on it's feet and quite successful. A few months later it was time to announce the company's first tablet computer. The product used a handwriting recognition program from a company called Go (later bought by AT&T and eventually folded). The "tablet" was two inches thick and weighed eight pounds or so. The worst part was the tentative name -- the "IBM 486SLC-2 Tablet Computer". A consultant came up with an alternative name -- the IBM ThinkPad. It was descriptive but seemed very strange at the time (more on that story in the future). With last night's announcement of the sale of IBM's PC business, what is the future of the ThinkPad? I would say very bright.
The deal that was announced sounds very good to me as a stockholder and as a former member of the PC team. The IBM PC and IBM ThinkPad are sentimental to millions of people but the deal was not about sentiment -- it was about strategy. The jewel in the transaction is not in the numbers -- it is in the people. I have known Steve Ward -- the new CEO -- and Fran O'Sullivan -- the new COO -- for a long time. They are top notch executives. Steve has been IBM's CIO, a former ThinkPad general manager, and head of IBM's global industrial sector. With a proven management team in place it shows the customers that both IBM and Lenovo Group are serious about keeping them as customers. It also shows the employees in the new venture a leadership that they already know and trust.
There are a number of more subtle benefits to the deal that go beyond the initial numbers. One is increased presence in the China market. IBM has been operating successfully in China for many years and has thousands of customers and employees there, but now, with a strong "local" partner, they will be able to expand the relationships beyond the current base. Lenovo has a lot of experience in dealing with high volumes of products and, combining that with the world class research and development of IBM, Lenovo will be able to expand their capabilities and continue the innovation that has been a hallmark of IBM. By "untethering" the PC business from IBM the new venture will have more flexibility to bob and weave around the competitive landscape. Meanwhile IBM can focus on high value businesses such as software, support, consulting, and other services. The bottom line with the deal is that there is synergy breaking out all over the place.
I have confidence they can make the combination successful. IBM has a good track record of both acquiring and spinning off businesses. A spin-off of a low-end printer division in 1991became Lexmark International, Inc., which is a $5 billion company with a market capitalization of more than $11 billion. The spin off of the low-end storage business to Hitachi Data Systems has gone very smoothly. Same thing on the acquisition side. In 1995 IBM acquired Lotus Development Corporation which is now at the forefront of redefining client software for the enterprise. The acquistion of Price Waterhouse Coopers Consulting is a text book case of leveraging two companies into one. In the past two years IBM has had more than two dozen acquisitions (mostly middleware companies), such as Rational, that have been seamlessly integrated. The IBM management team knows how to work with other companies. Although handheld devices are becoming the majority player in the connected world, the PC is not going to go away anytime soon. I expect to be using ThinkPads for a long time to come.
Innovation is one of those words that is a bit hard to internalize. Merriam-Webster says innovation is the introduction of something new or a new idea, method, or device. That would be a narrow definition -- perhaps even obsolete. Innovation is much more than invention or introducing new technology. Some would say that innovation is more of a state of mind. An attitude. One thing is for sure: innovation is happening more quickly, it is more open and more collaborative.
All three of these factors -- speed, openness, and collaboration -- are caused by or driven by the Internet. Speed for sure. A new idea emerging in a country we never heard of can be globally recognized in minutes. The openness factor is really about standards. The Internet is not the first thing to be built on standards but it is arguably the most significant. As one travels around the world you can find cars with the steering wheel on different sides, railroad systems of different track sizes, and electrical and telephone connectors of every size and shape. The Internet, on the other hand, works exactly the same way at every corner of the Earth. Collaboration is one of the many applications of the Internet, enabling people in different time zones to share workloads and ideas. The old model of tightly controlled intellectual property is falling by the wayside to the new model of innovation.
To better understand what the new model of innovation may mean for business and society, IBM convened the Global Innovation Outlook (GIO). . The concept was that IBM would open up its legendary technical and business trend analysis processes to outsiders and collaborate with them to gain insight to then share with everybody. Over the course of 10 meetings in 24 days on 3 continents, more than 100 leaders from business, academia, government, and other organizations joined with IBM's top researchers and consultants to examine three areas that affect the key aspects of society that are ripe for innovation:
the future of healthcare, the relationship between government and its citizens, and the intersection of work and life.
The findings from these discussions were released on November 16, 2004 at a major event at Rockefeller University in New York City. I felt quite fortunate to attend. It was very nice to see many former colleagues from IBM, the media, consulting firms, companies, and universities that I have worked with over the years. The meeting was kicked off by Nick Donofrio, Senior Vice President for Technology and Manufacturing at IBM. Nick spearheads many important issues at IBM, including IBM Research, and engages actively in science, technology, and governments around the world. The keynote address, "The Changing Nature of Innovation" was given by Sam Palmisano, Chairman and CEO of IBM. This was followed by a summary of the GIO findings described by Ginni Rometty, Managing Partner for IBM Business Consulting Services.
The remainder of the day included three excellent panel discussions. The full story shows the subjects, moderator and participants on the panels. The GIO conference did not attempt to provide all the answers or offer solutions to major issues raised in the three areas. The conference certainly placed IBM in a very good light and showed off the company's unique combination of world-class technology leadership and deep expertise in business and industry. The deep relationships IBM has with a broad range of clients, governments, universities and other ecosystem members around the world resulted in a really top-notch set of participants. The value of the conference will come from the continuing and expanded dialogue which will wrestle with the questions, implications and even contradictions inherent in the topics discussed. There is no doubt that the collaborations coming out of this will make the world a better place.
You can download the Global Innovation Outlook paper here.
There was a lot going on at IBM in October. Here are the announcements made by the company. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
Here are a few I found particularly interesting.
Clinic adopts IBM genomics solution
IBM and The Cleveland Clinic will develop a translational medicine platform that will use information from medical records to support genetic research. I think this is really important stuff. Today, diagnostics, prescriptions, and treatments are mostly based on the experience of the doctor. Nothing wrong with that per se, but much better outcomes will be possible when a large amount of experience is extracted from the cumulativerecords of millions of patient records (on an anonymous basis).
IBM unveils first biometric ThinkPad
IBM introduced the first ThinkPad with an integrated fingerprint reader. I can't wait to get one of these. I am currently using a fingerprint reader plugged in to my keyboard. It makes much easier and more secure when logging in to web sites and desktop applications.
Stop & Shop to roll out intelligent shopping carts
Stop & Shop's new "Shopping Buddy" is equipped with a touch-screen IBM computer and a laser scanner. Self check-out works really well at Home Depot. Stop & Shop is taking things a step further.
Many companies slow down during the late summer and take a while to get back in high gear in September. Based on the announcements from IBM, it did not seem that the company took much of a breather. Here are the announcements from IBM since early August. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
Starting with this posting of "IBM Happenings", I will do the postings monthly. I may highlight a couple of the announcements that I personally found quite interesting. Out of the current couple of dozen announcements the ones about voice recognition, RFID, and speech enablement of Apache are quite leading edge. These projects show where the future is going to be -- and already unfolding.
IBM delivers in-car speech recognition- Working with Honda Motor Company, the two have jointly developed an in-vehicle speech-recognition system using IBM's Embedded ViaVoice software.
IBM expands RFID offerings- A broad suite of services has been announced to to speed the benefits of RFID systems to industrial companies and mid-market businesses. RFID is going to be part of our everyday life very soon.
IBM to contribute speech software to Apache- Sounds boring, but contributing Reusable Dialog Components to Apache Software Foundation and proposing a project at Eclipse to donate markup editors for speech standards will accelerate making the Web something we can talk to and listen to.
There were a lot of interesting announcements from IBM this past week. Some of the headlines may be of interest. I was particularly interested personally in the story about what is going on at Mayo Clinic. Here is an index to the latest ...
Last month I took a ride up to Cambridge, Massachusetts and visited with the Extreme Blue interns -- top computer
science and business students from some of the top universities in America. The Extreme Blue program, which began in 1999 at an IBM facility in Cambridge operates at more than ten IBM locations around the world and brings together a couple of hundred incredibly talented young people to work on projects for the summer. The students are split into teams of three or four computer science students and a business school student. Each of the projects has a sponsor from somewhere in IBM and a an IBM mentor who provides advice and support during the project.
The grand finale occurred in Armonk, New York, where IBM has it's worldwide headquarters. The EB students from around the United States spent a couple of days demonstrating the results of their summer projects to senior IBM software, services, and hardware staff and management and to the top executives of the company.
The projects are very real (see related links for more info about them), they result in significant contributions to the company and also to the development of the students. Extreme Blue interns almost always exceed everyone’s expectations. The thing about students is that they have no & baggage& . They don’t know all the things that may not have worked in the past or all the reasons why something can’t get done in a short period of time. No blinders. Totally uninhibited. They have the summer all of twelve weeks or so. Whatever it takes, they will get the job done. The date for their grand finale is set at the beginning of the summer -- ten minutes on stage in front of an auditorium full of fellow interns as well as the IBM staff and management. Projects can't slip like they might in the "normal" world. Students are fearless and tireless. They learn a lot about IBM and from their mentors but I think IBM learns even more from the students. How they think and work together. Their attitudes about technology. The trends they see. Their view of the future. It is so uplifting and enriching to talk to the students and learn from them.
I finally tore myself away from the Extreme Blue dinner at 10:30 so I could get home for some sleep before an early train to NYC for a board meeting this morning and then on to San Francisco for WebSec 2004. WebSec is a conference offered by the MIS Training Institute and will be covering
many important topics including Securing Web Transactions,
Identity Theft and Digital Identities,
Securing Internet Information Servers,
Developing a Superior Web Security Architecture, and
Penetration Testing for Financial Organizations. I will be kicking things off in the morning with my view of The Future of the Internet.
This was a very special week for me as I was privileged to spend a lot of time with students. On Tuesday I met with Extreme Blue interns -- top computer
science and business students from some of the top universities in America. The Extreme Blue program, which began in 1999 at an IBM facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts, operates at a half dozen IBM locations around the world and brings together incredibly talented young people to work on projects for the summer. The students are split into teams of three or four computer science students and a business school student. Each of the projects has a sponsor from somewhere in IBM and a an IBM mentor who provides advice and support during the project.
The projects are very real and result in significant contributions to the company and also to the development of the students. In the final week the students get to present their ideas and progress to senior executives of the company, including the chairman of the board. The projects I saw were impressive and far-reaching focused on database technology to enable doctors to be more effective in prescribing medications or treatments, sophisticated algorithms for provisioning of grid computing resources, a workflow model to improve efficiency for researchers, enhancements for help-desk support for users, and technology to enable IBM consultants to find business partners for specific kinds of client projects. All of the projects were built using using the very latest in open standards technologies. (read more)
After thirty-five years at IBM, it is hard to cut the cord. I am officially a retiree (e-tiree) but I do maintain a strong interest in what is going on at the company -- needless to say. The good news is that there is a lot going on there! I will occasionally post a list of headlines of "IBM Happenings" that may be of interest.
It is hard to believe that it has been ten years, as of May 24, that ibm.com came to life. The occasion brought back many fond memories for me as I recalled working with my colleagues at IBM to make it happen. The history of the effort has been reported in a number of magazines and books, including a story in the Harvard Business Review. The effort was inspired, in part, by a paper called "Get Connected" which I wrote in late 1993. The concepts described in the paper seem very primitive now, but at the time most people thought they were revolutionary or radical or even weird.
As far as I know, the U.S., European, and Asian press have not picked up on the story, but the Latin American reporters have been quite interested in the history of ibm.com. More importantly, they are very interested in the future of the Internet, and so I was very pleased to spend a few hours last month talking with a number of journalists from Mexico, Uruguay, and other Latin American countries. Here are two of the stories that have been published so far...
I don't normally post IBM
news reports, but the current
earnings report got me thinking about the information technology industry
more broadly so I decided to share my simple observation. In my travels to conferences
around the world I have heard people say that spending for information technology
is not growing, or is flat, or is down, or even non-existent. I have even heard
it said that "there are absolutely no IT projects happening"! IBM
is in the information technology business -- that is where nearly all of it's
revenue comes from -- services, software, and hardware. If customers don't spend,
there is no revenue. IBM's revenue for the the second quarter of the year was
$21.6 billion. No matter how you slice it, dice it, adjust for currency, reorganizations,
acquisitions or deacquisitions, it comes out to more than $200 million per day.
Per day!
I
got ready last night – set the Garmin
StreetPilot GPS to point to 1 Rogers Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts
and topped off
the Harley gas tank. The ride began at 6:30 AM and was met with heavy fog
along Route 7 and on Interstate 84, but as the morning unfolded, things cleared
up and it was a beautiful 168 mile ride. I stopped just inside the Massachusetts
border to get an Egg
McMuffin, a cup of coffee, and check my email using 1xRTT. WiFi was not
available -- I know it will be soon. But, this story is not about WiFi or motorcycles.
It is about students and technology – a la IBM’s
extreme Blue.
There have been many books written about IBM. I own and have read eight of them. The first one on the list is A Business and its Beliefs, by Thomas J. Watson, Jr. It was published forty years ago, in 1963. I read it in 1967, the year I joined IBM. The annual report for 1967 showed revenue of $5.3 billion -- a 26% increase of $1.1 billion over 1966. Profit before tax was $1.3 Billion. There were many successes for IBM in 1967. NASA completed its first qualification flight for the Saturn V rocket. Inside of the Saturn was an instrumentation unit three-feet high and 68 feet in circumference which was assembled and programmed by IBM at Huntsville, Alabama. The IBM annual report said that "The Saturn V eventually will be used to propel American astronauts to the moon..". The System/360 computer was being produced at a rate exceeding 1,000 systems per month and the annual report highlighted the fact that the computer industry had grown to the point where there were "thousands of computer installations throughout the world". I was one of 23,000 new employees to join IBM in 1967 and I was convinced it was the best possible place anyone could work. I still am. (read more)
I have been getting a lot of questions about Cometa Networks and this update will provide some thoughts about last weeks announcement but I would like to first make some reflections to put things in context. The continued growth of WiFi seems so assured to me and I believe it will revolutionize the world much as the web has. WiFi reminds me of 1993. The Internet had already been around for a long time. It was the web that made the Internet vastly more useful, just like the spreadsheet made the PC vastly more useful.
Cometa will make WiFi more useful, leverage the individual strengths of the founding companies, and bring them good returns. For AT&T it will increase traffic on their wired infrastructure. Cometa will make use of the vast AT&T IP network and fiber capabilities for the back-haul portion of the Cometa service, and of AT&T's sophisticated network management capabilities. For Intel it will mean more opportunity for chips -- WiFi chips that they plan to put in everything possible. Their new Banias microprocessor archi8tecture is going to support not only today's WiFi (802.11b) but also the much faster 802.11a in one package. The new chips will also use less power, generate less heat, and will simplify many of the steps needed to connect wirelessly and to move between various types of WiFi networks. (read more)
Bob Sutor, IBM's director of Web services and one of my former colleagues, just had an article published on C|NET entitled "The Five Biggest Myths About Web Services". It very clearly addresses the key questions that I have received many times over the past couple of years and so I wanted to share his story. I couldn't possibly say it as well as he has. The other question I get a lot is, "What is the next big thing?". My answer is that there are a lot of next big things! My current top-five list includes the following (in alphabetical order):
Thanks to Mike Nelson at IBM for providing this update about the Internet2 members' meeting held in downtown Los Angeles. Internet2 is a consortium of about 200 colleges and universities and about 50 corporate partners working together to deploy and demonstrate high-speed networking applications. Internet2's Abilene backbone network runs at 2.4 gigabit/second with plans to upgrade it to 10 gigabit/second. There was a lot of discussion about videoconferencing, optical networking, authentication systems, high-speed networking in the movie and television industry, and new applications using IPv6 on the Abilene network. (read more)
Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround
I heard that Imus was talking about Lou Gerstner's book this morning. My sources tell me that Imus said it was well written and anyone starting up a company should read it! I certainly agree and am sure many people are pre-ordering it. (read more)
Autonomic computing
My first web site was started back in 1995 and was located at 
The months of January and February were busy ones at 
There is something about 
The months of November and December were busy ones at 
Energy saving solar technology will be built into asphalt, paint and windows. There could be huge savings by having solar heat embedded in our sidewalks, driveways, siding, paint, rooftops, and windows. The cost of solar is going to drop with the creation of “thin-film” solar cells that can be 100 times thinner than today's materials. The new material can be “printed” and arranged on a flexible backing, suitable for not only the tops but also the sides of buildings.
I am sticking to my story -- the 
The 
In a nutshell, 
The United States granted the first patent to 
The annual "
And now we have 
Will social networking payoff in business terms? Nobody knows for sure but in my opinion it is certain -- as soon as we see the 
We all have our
favorites. Me too. Books, web sites, restaurants, plays, movies, orchestras, composers,
concerts, hiking and biking trails, places to run, etc. Occasionally
I write about these "
When you click on a link, a 
One of the scary things out there is the potential spread of 
The flight from Frankfurt, Germany arrived in 
Visiting China is an eye opener culturally and economically. It is a rapidly developing country and it appears that special interest groups do not get in the way of progress. Perhaps it was the same way when America was building the 
Seems like 
There have been several stories here about 
The 
The final afternoon of the 
IBM had some demonstrations set up in the breakout areas at the 
Following Nakamura-san at the 
The shuttle buses departing from the 
The central theme at the 
Today I attended the 
On February7 we will be discussing Computational Biology at 
The new 
In 1980, while serving as branch manager for 
As discussed here many times, grass roots movements such as the Internet and Linux are hard to stop. However, one of the impediments to very fast adoption of Linux as compared to just the fast adoption that is taking place has been the underlying threat of legal action to a user or vendor of Linux by a patent holder. 
Google the word "nano" and you get nearly 70 million results -- ranging from the 
The folks at 
A little more than five years ago (see "
A 
I first met 
An IBM colleague from years past, 
Last month I took a ride up to Cambridge, Massachusetts and visited with the 
I
got ready last night – set the