Blog: Richard Hackathorn

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IBM IOD/Gold - Software Strategy/Architecture

Next session was on IBM Software Strategy and Architecture by Jim Caldwell, Director of Software Group (SWG) Technical Strategy. SWG is $20+ billion unit with worldwide presence with development labs, exec briefing centers, technical centers, lab services personnel, tech sales personnel, sales specialist personnel, with a total of is 45K people, 5K field technical support plus 30K SQW partners. The SWG portfolio is evolving from the base of the brands of Information Mgt, Lotus, Rational, Tivoli, and WebSphere.

Jim started with the theme of innovation. For the SWG, to be innovative means to be. . . Hungry for change, Innovative beyond customer imagination, Globally integrated, Disruptive by nature, and Genuine but not generous. Current economic conditions have given us a new set of opportunities, such as equity trading is down but volumes are way up! Can your systems handle this volume?

Strategically, we need to enable innovation in a complex world by providing next-gen open integration platform. Jim then cover several areas upon which IBM will focus:

- Web 2.0: key is exposing the social networking with companies, such as Mashup Centers and Project Zero

- Software for next-gen systems: multi-core processors => parallelism. SWG is focusing on evolving their SW portfolio for parallelism. Will fund a round of VC investments to see where this technology leads. Hardware vendors will out-strip the ability of software vendors to exploit.

- Appliance: Defined as purpose-built hardware device that can be dropped into the enterprise network. DataPower emerged as effective means to build SOA systems. Will do more! An appliance is a personification of the radical simplification and consumability initiatives within IBM. Does this sounds like the old I-series? Sure! Will deliver more virtual appliance (VMware) that comes pre-built on disk. Just freeze dry it, and the let the customer add water when needed.

- Event processing: massive scalability (volume) and fast response times (speed) mainly in financial markets. Full spectrum of business event processing analytics as. . . Business logic derived events, Business activity monitoring, Information derived events, Active diagnostics, Business service mgt, High volume and stream analytics, and Predictive processing

- Acquisition Process: selecting right companies to acquire, financially responsible, integrate quickly, and leverage. IBM has bought many companies, as was shown in this incredible slide
of acquisitions over 10+ years!

- Standards are important to IBM. We develop lots of open standards and then give these standards away. It actually makes good business sense for IBM.

- Development effectiveness: Need to development software on three levels for consumability: base products, common combinations, situational combination. Must evolve situational-specific products incrementally. IBM's agile development based on the Agile Manifesto (Wikipedia entry)

[Blog stream from IBM IOD/Gold October 2008 is here]

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