Notebook: Enterprise Execs Reveal More at Vortex - ' IBM and Integration ' (
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IBMs vice president of technology and strategy, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, started out with a 20,000-foot view.
"Society is in the beginning of a transition from the industrial age to the information age," he said. Wladawsky-Berger summarized his companys focus of "on demand computing" into three critical areas:
- "Integration at all levels based on open industry standards."
- "That integration causes an incredible possibility of innovative industry solutions, industry by industry by industry. But you need to focus, regardless of what business you are in, on how to involve your industry and transform yourself to take advantage of all these possibilities."
- "Society is now so incredibly dependent on the IT infrastructure that it has to work incredibly well—performance, scalability, durability, availability. So, you need a really, really well-functioning IT infrastructure."
The old way of selling IT products, by controlling technologies to maximize market share, just isnt possible in todays ubiquitous IT world, according to IBM. Instead, the company is focusing on integration with its middleware offerings—including WebSphere, DB2 and Workplace—and by facilitating integration with other components through open standards.
Wladawsky-Berger also highlighted IBMs consulting business as a way to deliver transformational business solutions industry by industry.
Unlike Hewlett-Packard Co. and Microsoft, which have a broad consumer line, IBM is focused solely on business—reaching consumers only through OEMs. He also pointed to IBMs industry focus as a strength, claiming that HP "doesnt have quite as strong an industry expertise and an industry consulting play." Sun, in his view, is "primarily a hardware vendor."
He also pointed to open source as a key element of IBMs strategy. "Without it, it is impossible to achieve the kind of integration that we think people need to achieve in the marketplace."
In his view, operating systems have already become a commodity, which makes Linux so strong. "Its the only operating system that runs on every single architecture," Wladawsky-Berger said. "The fact that Linux runs on everything puts it in the same category as Internet technologies like TCP-IP and all the XML stuff, and it makes it much easier to move workflows around because you have the same underlying operating system."
He was less sanguine about Sun president Jonathan Schwartz comments Tuesday about Solaris versus Red Hat. "Poor Jonathan is searching for something to grab onto to say that Solaris is better than Linux in high-volume systems," Wladawsky-Berger said. "I think he needs to do better than that."
Read more here about the first set of Vortex keynotes.
Both Microsoft and EMC were very "on message," barely deviating from their canned scripts.
EMC had taken some hits during a previous panel, voted the least likely to succeed of all of the top vendors. Howard Elias, the companys executive vice president in charge of marketing, addressed the problem head-on by talking about how the acquisitions of Legato, Documentum and VMWare were transforming the company from a hardware vendor to one that provides services and data management as well.
"We have a unique lens," Elias said. "Our lens is coming from storage and information management, and our construction when you move up the stack has that lens."
Elias then introduced a theme hed return to frequently during the discussion—that while the industry has focused on technology, EMC was looking to put the I (for information) back into IT.
Next Page: Working to own the vertical stack.
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