The first day of Edge 2016 was about systems – a subject I enjoy thinking and writing about. Headed up by Tom Rosamilia, IBM systems group in 2016 sells z Systems, Power Servers, an array of storage products (both hardware and Spectrum software) and a number of associated cloud IaaS and PaaS services. But this wasn’t a day full of product and product feature discussions, more a detailed review of tools, applications, market developments and trends… and included (most importantly) lots of involvement by key customers demonstrating how to adopt and adapt technology to do things more efficiently, at greater scale and more cheaply than before. I don’t think IBM itself can be an ecosystem, but its z Systems and Power servers certainly are. This post is a synopsis of innovation being deployed by IBM and its customers to meet their growing business challenges.
Speaking to a packed house of 5.5k attendees Tom introduced the conference as being about changes in the industry and what we need to do about it, encouraging us to ‘invest in yourself’ in order to adjust. He gave he synopsis of IBM’s Systems group as ‘cognitive computing delivered through a cloud platform in an industry context’. At an industry sector level he believes Financial Services and Retail have already changed, while Health Care needs more (something IBM is investing in). His company has made 30 acquisitions in 3 years, including UStream (video streaming), EZsource (source code analysis) and Cleversafe (cloud Object storage).
He noted that we need technology innovation to keep up with need for constant change. In particular:
- Systemic performance improvements to deal with issues such as the data challenge, which he described as 90% of data in the world having been created in the last 2 years, 80% of data being unstructured and 60% of the total being irrelevant now. Moore’s law has been tapering off for some time, which is why IBM is concentrating on ‘systemic’ – rather than raw processor – performance improvements to deliver workloads such as in-line analytics on the mainframe in real-time (the sort of thing banks do to stop fraud when someone’s stolen your bank card).
- Technology is back as the most important game-changer in all industry sectors according to IBM’s latest Institute for Business Value (IBV) survey, which found that 72% of the 5.2k respondents ticked the technology box. Technology isn’t just important for start-ups such as Air B&B and Kickstarter, but also for Financial services and aircraft manufacturers such as Airbus Industries. He said that technology change doesn’t stand on its own – it has to be done for business value.
- Talking about storage he claims that ‘flash makes the impossible possible’ and thinking from a user perspective, ‘because I can, I should or my competition will do it to me’. This served as an introduction to an endorsement of IBM’s flash storage by the dating site company Plenty of Fish, which was running into bottlenecks streaming images to its 100m subscribers. It now streams 30k messages per second using 30 servers with its new kit and achieved a return on investment in just 2 months. He got us all laughing by saying ‘if you can’t get a date though, don’t blame Tom!”
- Collaborative Innovation – the same IVB survey found that 70% of CxOs plan to expand their partner network. He illustrated IBM’s own activities by the increasing membership of the Power Open Association, which has grown from an initial 5 members to 250 in 26 countries now. It holds Technology summits proving that Power is no longer just an IBM brand. The collaboration in this group has seen the development of new solutions such as the University of Michigan’s modelling of thermodynamics in and around engines using Power processors linked to GPUs from NVidia and processors from Melanox.
- Business model innovation – 80% of CxOs in the IVB study said they were experimenting with business models. He mentioned Blockchain (an Open Source movement setting about the creation of trusted distributed ledgers), which is both a threat and an opportunity for industry sectors such as Finance, Logistics and Public administration. Despite the fact Blockchain is in its infancy IBM already has 2 development versions available on its BlueMix PaaS site – one a version for software developers to get to learn about how workloads can be built and the second, allowing customers to build real applications: this version is based on LinuxOne, builds hyperledger code and creates an encrypted LPAR container. Blockchain is a fascinating development – a number of other presentations talked about its potential to disrupt and disintermediate many established payment systems. IBM customers, such as Wells Fargo Bank are also driving innovation via their own labs.
- Cloud – IBM has been working to enhance the services its customers can use to access z System and Power processing via the Cloud (the former from traditional IBM data bases and the latter via SoftLayer’s data centers), including data copy management in the cloud. Other announcements made by IBM on day one of the conference concerned extending the usability of Power servers through partnerships with Ubuntu and Red Hat (both Linux distributions) and Horton Works (Hadoop databases and analytics).
Other speakers in the first general session included Ed Walsh (Storage) who introduced us to Matt Cadieux of Red Bull Racing – a Formula 1 team using a wide range of IBM technologies, Matt Whitbourne (z IT service management), who introduced Michael Lawley of HealthPlan Services, Satya Sharma (Power), who talked with Jacob Yundt of UPMC (also a healthcare provider), Terri Vernig (Power ecosystem), who discussed developments with both Jim Totton of Red Hat and Scott Gnau of Horton Works.
Overall this was a great introduction to the business challenges of IBM’s customers and the various ways in which they’re innovating to face their challenges. IBM is working hard to keep up through developing hardware, software and services to support them. Of all the developments underway I think Blockchain and the use of IT in motor racing were the most interesting to me. I’m planning to write more about these in future research posts.