IBM’s Ambuj Goyal – A New Lens On Data Centre Development

IBM Data Centre Vision Highlights

• Separates ‘systems of engagement’ from ‘systems of record’ trends
• Reviews the increasing CIO challenges
• Sees a need to accelerate business velocity
• Focuses on reducing server management and admin costs as a proportion of data centre spending
• Identifies six trends in consolidation over time
• Offers integrated offerings (such as PureSystems) to intersect these evolving user needs
• We believe it offers Matrix Integration, protecting customers from future lock-in

Notes: Large = >1k , Medium = 100-1k, Small = <100 employee organisations; IT services, software applications and tools and OEM business excluded
IBM’s European STG meeting is one of the most important events of the year for ITCandor and I was sorry not to be able to join in person this year. Luckily Ambuj Goyal’s keynote presentation was broadcasted on Twitter’s Livestream, giving me an excellent opportunity to follow along, tweet and ask questions. You’ll be interested to learn about IBM’s approach, which includes some deep thinking about data centre trends and its customers’ changing needs.

Data Centre Trends – Separating Systems Of Engagement From Systems Of Record

Ambuj’s ideas include looking at how users interact with systems from how and where information is stored, referring to these as ‘systems of engagement’ and ‘systems of record’ respectively. While companies need to make sure their data retention and protection policies are managed in line with compliance with legislation and regulations, they also need to support deeper interaction from internal and external customers. ‘Systems of engagement’ is the newer trend at the heart of the Internet data centres in public Clouds, but also needs to be considered in traditional data centres whose primary focus is on transaction processing – financial institutions, for instance, need to add not just Internet banking, but also new types of social business processes (we’ve already seen how the bank Ing now claims to address emotional alongside the transactional needs of its customers). He noted that users need to know where the record resides to manage it from a regularity point of view, but the rest is a question of how you manage sprawl.

The CIO’s Systems View Is Full Of Applications And Processes

Ambuj noted that CIOs have an application/workload view of system, even in small and medium sized businesses. They have seen a steady rise in the number and associated costs of underlying systems, licenses and the vendors they need to manage. They also have an urgent need to accelerate business velocity. However data centre managers shouldn’t blame CIOs for rising costs.
IBM believes that the total cost of server management and administration were 66% of data centre costs in 2011 and rising. Ambuj noted 6 different forms of consolidation used to address data centre sprawl, which he labelled (in order):

• consolidation upgrades
• consolidate without migration
• consolidate with standardisation
• ‘full in place’ consolidation
• dev-ops model transformation
• programming model shift

He also profiled how the data centre of the future will need to incorporate standard stacks, converged infrastructures, recovery-oriented computing, Software Defined Data Centres, data centre OSes to handle their data and transactions.

IBM Offers Integrated Systems To Intersect Evolving Data Centre Needs

As we’ve noted before IBM is building an increasing number of integrated systems to help its customers with these challenges and of course Ambuj mentioned its most recently introduced Power 7+ , PureData and storage (DS8870, Storwise V7000 and TS7700) offerings. He sees the role of STG’s 23k engineers as helping its systems move to where in the world and CIOs are moving towards. They are involved in introducing standardisation, while trying to prevent user lock-in and advising on future systems design. He summarised by saying that IBM’s approach is designed to help its customers leverage the Cloud, unlock Big Data and secure their critical information.

Some Conclusions – The Pros And Cons Of Integration

IBM is a server – and large user – centric supplier (see Figure 1 for our view of its data centre revenues by offering and user size), so it’s hardly surprising that it takes a workload view of data centre computing. In this presentation it offered some new insight into how to look at an old subject – especially in the need to focus on ‘systems of engagement’ and how the nature of consolidation changes over time.
Data centre users spent $141 billion (47.4% of the total) on internal staff in the year to June and reducing these costs is central to any supplier’s success. IBM – like other systems suppliers – is offering integration, automation and standardisation as ways of meeting the competing challenges of restrictive budgets and increasing workloads. To take advantage its customers will undoubtedly give up some of the freedom of compoent selection they’ve been used to. IBM will need to protect them from future lock-in, engaging in what we term ‘Matrix’ – rather than ‘Vertical – integration.