How does IBM connectivity and integration portfolio compare to Oracle?

The ability of enterprises to create new applications is limited by the ways those applications can reuse existing business logic and data. This explains huge interest in messaging and connectivity products. Some call them ESBs, others call them SOA products, but no matter what you call it, this kind of specialized middleware must provide a set of capabilities that make it easier to connect to many different types of old and new applications, data formats, protocols and be able to perform transformation of the above mentioned things. Synchronous, asynchronous, transactional, reliable and high performance capabilities are a big plus (as they say in job postings).

Where there is demand, there is usually supply. In case of IBM and Oracle, both vendors provide a set of offerings that claim to solve the problem of connectivity. Both vendors claim that they have the “most complete integration solution on the planet”. I decided to take a look and compare. In this first article of the series I will simply look at the products at a high level and in subsequent articles will look into specifics and more in-depth technical and financial TCO comparisons between products. Here is how offerings from these two vendors stack up to each other. Please note that color coding on this comparison is meant to reflect the strength of the product based on (a) Technical capabilities (performance, feature richness, security, scalability, etc.) and (b) Market position (number of users, market share, history, release schedules, analysts’ feedback, etc.).

By: Roman Kharkovski
Source: http://smarterquestions.org/2013/03/how-does-ibm-connectivity-and-integration-portfolio-compare-to-oracle/

IBM Discovers New Atomic Technique to Charge Memory Chips

IBM today announced a materials science breakthrough at the atomic level that could pave the way for a new class of non-volatile memory and logic chips that would use less power than today’s silicon based devices. Rather than using conventional electrical means that operate today’s semiconducting devices, IBM’s scientists discovered a new way to operate chips using tiny ionic currents, which are streams of charged atoms that could mimic the event-driven way in which the human brain operates.

Optical image of a typical ionic liquid (IL) gated device with a droplet of IL on top of the gate electrode and the oxide channel. The gold squares are pads used to make contact to the device via wire-bonding. On right is the magnified image of the device showing the channel (brownish yellow) and the gold electrical contacts (bright yellow). The contacts on the right and left of the channel are the source and drain contacts. The four other contact are used for 4-wire resistance & Hall measurements. (Credit: IBM)

Today’s computers typically use semiconductors made with CMOS process technologies and it was long thought that these chips would double in performance and decrease in size and cost every two years. But the materials and techniques to develop and build CMOS chips are rapidly approaching physical and performance limitations and new solutions may soon be needed to develop high performance and low-power devices.

IBM research scientists showed that it is possible to reversibly transform metal oxides between insulating and conductive states by the insertion and removal of oxygen ions driven by electric fields at oxide-liquid interfaces. Once the oxide materials, which are innately insulating, are transformed into a conducting state, the IBM experiments showed that the materials maintain a stable metallic state even when power to the device is removed. This non-volatile property means that chips using devices that operate using this novel phenomenon could be used to store and transport data in a more efficient, event-driven manner instead of requiring the state of the devices to be maintained by constant electrical currents.

“Our ability to understand and control matter at atomic scale dimensions allows us to engineer new materials and devices that operate on entirely different principles than the silicon based information technologies of today,” said Dr. Stuart Parkin, an IBM Fellow at IBM Research. “Going beyond today’s charge-based devices to those that use miniscule ionic currents to reversibly control the state of matter has the potential for new types of mobile devices. Using these devices and concepts in novel three-dimensional architectures could prevent the information technology industry from hitting a technology brick wall.”

To achieve this breakthrough, IBM researchers applied a positively charged ionic liquid electrolyte to an insulating oxide material - vanadium dioxide - and successfully converted the material to a metallic state. The material held its metallic state until a negatively charged ionic liquid electrolyte was applied, to convert it back to its original, insulating state.

Such metal to insulator transition materials have been extensively researched for a number of years. However, contrary to earlier conclusions, IBM discovered that it is the removal and injection of oxygen into the metal oxides that is responsible for the changes in state of the oxide material when subjected to intense electric fields.

The transition from a conducting state to an insulating state has also previously been obtained by changing the temperature or applying an external stress, both of which do not lend themselves to device applications.

ABSTRACT - Electrolyte gating with ionic liquids is a powerful tool for inducing novel conducting phases in correlated insulators. An archetypal correlated material is vanadium dioxide (VO2), which is insulating only at temperatures below a characteristic phase transition temperature. We show that electrolyte gating of epitaxial thin films of VO2 suppresses the metal-to-insulator transition and stabilizes the metallic phase to temperatures below 5 kelvin, even after the ionic liquid is completely removed. We found that electrolyte gating of VO2 leads not to electrostatically induced carriers but instead to the electric field–induced creation of oxygen vacancies, with consequent migration of oxygen from the oxide film into the ionic liquid. This mechanism should be taken into account in the interpretation of ionic liquid gating experiments.

By: Brian Wang
Source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/03/ibm-discovers-new-atomic-technique-to.html

IBM Pioneers New Liquid-Based Transistors That Mimic The Human Brain

IBM researchers have made a dramatic new breakthrough, creating a new model for the transistor that could one day lead to less power-hungry computer chips that mimic the way the human brain operates.

Transistors have been at the heart of tech-heavy society for decades – they can be likened to the ‘building blocks’ of the electronic circuits that power all of the gadgets we take for granted nowadays, be it smartphones, tablets, PCs or televisions. But despite all of the technological advances made in recent years, with ever smaller but more and more powerful devices emerging each year, the transistor itself has seen little change, until now.
The breakthrough, which is described in the journal Science and reported by The New York Times, involves a new coating for the transistor that allows it to read ionic signals, rather than standard electronic ones. Older transistors have traditionally relied on electrical currents to switch materials between conducting and insulating states, but the new method uses what IBM describes as “ionic currents”, or mobile charged atoms, as a switching mechanism. Essentially, circuit boards built using the technique would contain ionic liquids, a kind of mixture where half of the molecules are positively charged, and half are negatively charged, similar in many ways to the electrical fluids that slosh around in the human brain.

Admittedly it all sounds a bit technical, but IBM says that it’s a very big deal as the development should allow chipmakers to increase the number of transistors it can load onto a single chip, vastly increasing their processing power.

An ionic fluid circuit would operate by passing fluid, shown in green, through conduits fabricated on top of a planar oxide surface.

Big Blue’s research team says that they haven’t actually made a chip using the new transistor, but it is able to demonstrate how a rough circuit would work. Even so, the company says that the new technology should be commercially viable, and expects it to leave the lab in the next five to seven years.

Do We Need a New Transistor? 

We sure do, if we want to keep on innovating and building smarter new devices. One of the problems faced by the chip industry today is keeping up with Moore’s Law, which dictates that the number of transistors on a chip should be doubled every 18 months to two years in order to foster new innovations. Up until now, chip makers like Intel have come up with the goods just by stuffing more transistors onto their chips each time, but doubling up is becoming much harder and its uncertain how long they can keep doing this.

Some might argue that we don’t need to stick Moore’s Law, but the fact is if we want to see technology progress then costs have to be kept down – if electronics become more expensive, then companies like Facebook and Google will find it harder to innovate.

IBM’s new technique, if it really does prove viable, should help to deal with one of the biggest problems presented by cramming smaller transistors on a chip. Electrons simply aren’t that efficient, they make lots of heat and noise, and so they drain lots of power. Hence, the more electrons on a chip, the more expensive that chip becomes. By using ionic fluids instead of electrons, IBM says that it can do away with much of this ‘leakage’, which would allow chipmakers to keep on doubling up without worrying about the costs.

By: Mike Wheatley
Source: http://siliconangle.com/blog/2013/03/22/ibm-pioneers-new-liquid-based-transistors-that-mimic-the-human-brain/

IBM’s Latest Microprocessors Inpsired By Human Brain

In accordance to Moore’s Law, the semiconductors of the future will have to continue to be improved upon year after year. IBM may already be getting a head start by taking some inspiration from the human brain to create their latest microchips.
Yesterday, IBM announced that they’ve been able to improve semiconductors on an atomic level using drops of ionic liquid. Today’s semiconductors require conventional electrical assistance to operate.
Under IBM’s new method, these semiconductors could be powered by the ionic liquid and even mimic the way the human brain operates. With this new approach, IBM could one day make a highly efficient chip which consumes less power. These chips could even go a long way to improve the battery life of today’s mobile devices. IBM’s work into developing this new procedure has been published in the journal Science.
“Our ability to understand and control matter at atomic scale dimensions allows us to engineer new materials and devices that operate on entirely different principles than the silicon based information technologies of today,” said IBM fellow at IBM Research Dr. Stuart Parkin in a statement.
“Going beyond today’s charge-based devices to those that use miniscule ionic currents to reversibly control the state of matter has the potential for new types of mobile devices. Using these devices and concepts in novel three-dimensional architectures could prevent the information technology industry from hitting a technology brick wall,” said Dr. Parkin.
At the heart of the process is one cubic millimeter of an ionic liquid electrolyte. This tiny droplet is able to transition between a positive and a negative charge, thereby giving the semiconductor its calculating power. This liquid process will also allow future chipmakers to produce even smaller semiconductors. Though Moore’s Law has accurately predicted the way by which computing technology advances, doubling upon itself with every generation, there are some physical limitations which are fast approaching. This new technique could remove these barriers and allow technology to continue to expand at its current clip.
IBM researchers also observed that this single drop of ionic liquid remained in a stable and metallic state, even once power had been removed from the semiconductor. This, say the researchers, is a phenomenon which could be used to store data in a more efficient and event-driven manner. This means data stored on a device could remain safely stored on the device even without power. Researchers also found that the ionic liquid did not change its negative or positive state until the opposite charge was applied. It’s this kind of event-driven behavior which could make future semiconductors all the more stable.
“We are using tiny currents of ions of atoms generated by these electrical signals to change the state of matter of this oxide material,” said Dr. Parkin in an interview with VentureBeat. “It is a means to build low-energy, highly efficient devices by turning on and off their conducting state. We turn this material into a metal and maintain it without any need to supply power.”
IBM’s research isn’t looking to replace silicon but to create a brand new class of processors. While these ionic processors have the advantage of efficiency and stability, Dr. Parkin says the currents flowing through the ionic liquid move much more slowly than currents in silicon.

By: Michael Harper
Source: http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1112808853/human-brain-inspires-ibm-microprocessors-032213/

IBM moves toward post-silicon transistor

IBM's new work shows that flexible low-power circuitry could be built with strongly correlated materials.

Exploring methods of computing without silicon, IBM has found a way to make transistors that could be fashioned into virtual circuitry that mimics how the human brain operates.

The proposed transistors would be made from strongly correlated materials, which researchers have found to posses characteristics favorable for building more powerful, less power-hungry computation circuitry.

"The scaling of conventional-based transistors is nearing an end after a fantastic run of 50 years," said Stuart Parkin, an IBM fellow at IBM Research who leads the research. "We need to consider alternative devices and materials that will have to operate entirely differently. There aren't many avenues to follow beyond silicon. One of them is correlated electronic systems."

Parkin's team is the first to convert metal oxides from an insulated to conductive state by applying oxygen ions to the material. The team published details of the work in this week's edition of the Science journal.

The circuitry used in today's computer processors, memory and other components is made from large numbers of integrated transistors built from silicon wafers. Conventional transistors work by applying a small voltage across a gate, which can control -- or switch on or off -- a larger current passing through the transistor.

IBM's technique uses another approach to switching conductive states of a material. It requires strongly correlated electron materials, such as metal oxides. By conventional theory, these materials should act like conductors, but they are actually insulators. "They don't obey conventional band theory," Parkin said. Under certain conditions, however, they can change their conductive states.

Research has been going on for several years, in fact, to find ways of changing conductivity states in strongly correlated materials. Previous approaches, however, relied on techniques of applying stress to a material, or subjecting it to temperature changes. Neither approach would be practical to use in mass-produced circuitry. IBM's specific breakthrough, described in the paper, is that the conductive state of material could be changed by injecting oxygen molecules.

In IBM's setup, these electrons are introduced through contact with an ionic liquid, consisting of large, irregularly shaped molecules. When a voltage is applied to this liquid, and the liquid is placed on the oxide material, the material can change from a conductor to an insulator, or vice versa.

This approach could be more energy effective than standard silicon transistors, in that the resulting transistors would be nonvolatile -- they don't need to be constantly refreshed with a power source to maintain their state, Parkin said. A charge can be set by applying the voltage once.

These materials may not switch their states as quickly as silicon transistors, though their relatively low switching speed may not be a factor, given their greater flexibility, Parkin said. In theory such transistors could mimic how the human brain operates in that "liquids and currents of ions [are used] to change materials," Parkin said. "We know brains can carry out computing operations a million times more efficiently than silicon-based computers," Parkin said.

To work, such circuitry would take advantage of microfluidics, the emerging practice of engineering around how to tightly control small amounts of liquids in a system. "We would direct fluids to particular surfaces or three-dimensional structures of oxides and then change their properties by applying gate voltages," Parkin said. Entire virtual circuits could be built and once their work is finished, they could be torn down by simply passing liquid though other channels.

By: Joab Jackson
Source:  http://news.techworld.com/mobile-wireless/3436634/ibm-moves-toward-post-silicon-transistor/

Record simulations conducted on Lawrence Livermore supercomputer

 

 

OSIRIS simulation on Sequoia of the interaction of a fast-ignition-scale laser with a dense DT plasma. The laser field is shown in green, the blue arrows illustrate the magnetic field lines at the plasma... more » interface and the red/yellow spheres are the laser-accelerated electrons that will heat and ignite the fuel. (Credit: Image courtesy of DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)« less

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have performed record simulations using all 1,572,864 cores of Sequoia, the largest supercomputer in the world. Sequoia, based on IBM BlueGene/Q architecture, is the first machine to exceed one million computational cores. It also is No. 2 on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers, operating at 16.3 petaflops (16.3 quadrillion floating point operations per second).
The simulations are the largest particle-in-cell (PIC) code simulations by number of cores ever performed. PIC simulations are used extensively in plasma physics to model the motion of the charged particles, and the electromagnetic interactions between them, that make up ionized matter. High performance computers such as Sequoia enable these codes to follow the simultaneous evolution of tens of billions to trillions of individual particles in highly complex systems.
Frederico Fiuza, a physicist and Lawrence Fellow at LLNL, performed the simulations in order to study the interaction of ultra-powerful lasers with dense plasmas in a proposed method to produce fusion energy, the energy source that powers the sun, in a laboratory setting. The method, known as fast ignition, uses lasers capable of delivering more than a petawatt of power (a million billion watts) in a fraction of a billionth of a second to heat compressed deuterium and tritium (DT) fuel to temperatures exceeding the 50 million degrees Celsius needed to initiate fusion reactions and release net energy. The project is part of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Fusion Energy Science Program.
This method differs from the approach being taken by LLNL's National Ignition Facility to achieve thermonuclear ignition and burn. NIF's approach is called the "central hot spot" scenario, which relies on simultaneous compression and ignition of a spherical fuel capsule in an implosion, much like in a diesel engine. Fast ignition uses the same hardware as the hot spot approach but adds a high-intensity, ultrashort-pulse laser as the "spark" that achieves ignition.
The code used in these simulations was OSIRIS, a PIC code that has been developed over more than 10 years in a collaboration between the University of California, Los Angeles and Portugal's Instituto Superior Técnico. Using this code, Fiuza demonstrated excellent scaling in parallel performance of OSIRIS to the full 1.6 million cores of Sequoia. By increasing the number of cores for a relatively small problem of fixed size, what computer scientists call "strong scaling," OSIRIS obtained 75 percent efficiency on the full machine. But when the total problem size was increased, what is called "weak scaling," a 97 percent efficiency was achieved.
"This means that a simulation that would take an entire year to perform on a medium-size cluster of 4,000 cores can be performed in a single day. Alternatively, problems 400 times greater in size can be simulated in the same amount of time," Fiuza said. "The combination of this unique supercomputer and this highly efficient and scalable code is allowing for transformative research."
OSIRIS is routinely used for fundamental science during the test phase of Sequoia in simulations with up to 256,000 cores. These simulations are allowing researchers, for the first time, to model the interaction of realistic fast-ignition-scale lasers with dense plasmas in three dimensions with sufficient speed to explore a large parameter space and optimize the design for ignition. Each simulation evolves the dynamics of more than 100 billion particles for more than 100,000 computational time steps. This is approximately an order of magnitude larger than the previous largest simulations of fast ignition.
Sequoia is a National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) machine, developed and fielded as part of NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program. Sequoia is preparing to move to classified computing in support of stockpile stewardship.
"This historic calculation is an impressive demonstration of the power of high-performance computing to advance our scientific understanding of complex systems," said Bill Goldstein, LLNL's deputy director for Science and Technology. "With simulations like this, we can help transform the outlook for laboratory fusion as a tool for science, energy and stewardship of the nuclear stockpile."

By:  Zeit News
Source: http://www.zeitnews.org/applied-sciences/computer-science/record-simulations-conducted-lawrence-livermore-supercomputer

OpenStack: Vive la revolution!

OpenStack has changed the cloud computing landscape and become the standard base for nearly every provider 

 

InfoWorld's Eric Knorr made a good call last week, stating, "IBM would take the helm as the corporate steward of OpenStack, surpassing in importance even Rackspace -- which along with NASA gave birth to OpenStack three years ago."

Although IBM won't provide its own OpenStack-based product, it will offer piece-parts based on OpenStack. IBM's sheer size and influence will make it one of the biggest drivers of OpenStack, passing up Hewlett-Packard, Rackspace, and dozens of other smaller OpenStack upstarts. Remember how IBM was a major force in mainstreaming Linux and open source a decade ago? It has the same potential with OpenStack.

Of course, IBM isn't the only 800-pound gorilla seeing opportunity in OpenStack. Last week Oracle acquired Nimbula, an OpenStack-based hybrid/private cloud technology provider. Most cloud market watchers, including me, believe Oracle is seeking core skills more than core technology -- in this case, OpenStack and Amazon Web Services expertise.

OpenStack officially launched on July 18, 2010, and its popularity rose quickly at larger enterprises seeking quick entry to the cloud computing market, such as HP, Dell, IBM, and now Oracle. Many small companies are also looking to OpenStack as a way to get their product to market using an existing code base. They are also providing products with more intrinsic market value based on tapping into both the OpenStack hype and its user acceptance.

You can even look at the fall -- and in some cases, the demise -- of several private cloud technology providers that predated the release of OpenStack. They did (or, more likely, could) not dial OpenStack into their product road maps, and the market pushed them aside.

There are a few reasons for the success and interest in OpenStack:

• OpenStack promises cloud interoperability and portability.
• OpenStack is not Amazon.com, VMware, or Microsoft.
• OpenStack is based on "open standards."
• OpenStack caught the interest of the big guys, including IBM and HP, that still drive enterprise IT sales.
• OpenStack has improved greatly since 2010.

OpenStack is not perfect. Although there is a somewhat common code base for core IaaS offerings, interoperability and portability are not yet proven. Moreover, most of the vendors leveraging OpenStack, including Dell, have rightly complained that the code base is immature and needs more work before it becomes useful. Finally, there is the likelihood that larger OpenStack vendors will take it in their own proprietary directions, thus diminishing the value of its "open standards."

Still, as long as OpenStack adoption continues to grow, the technology is likely to mature to meet all those expectations -- mine included.

By: David Linthicum 

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/openstack-vive-la-revolution-214686

Entry Power7+ Servers: How IBM Sees The Deal

We've been going through the feeds and speeds, slots and watts, and dollars and sense of the new entry Power7+ processors to help you sort out what machines might be in your future and what kind of dough you will have to come up with to get there. It takes lots of points of view to make a proper landscape, and this week, I'll take a look into the analysis that IBM has done for business partners to give them a starting point when they are peddling the new Power7+ entry servers to customers.

The Power 710+ and Power 730+ machines are, as we have been discussing, more densely packed in their 2U enclosures. IBM did not put out a 1U Power 705+, but it could at some point if enough customers required a dense-packed pizza box server. It did have a Power 505 and 505+ in the Power6 and Power6+ generation of machines in an effort to pursue Power-Linux shops, but this time around, IBM seems content to peddle 2U PowerLinux machines, which have lower processing, memory, and disk drive costs compared to plain-vanilla Power Systems machines, which can run AIX or IBM i in addition to Linux from Red Hat and SUSE Linux. This chart kind of wraps up the positioning between the 2U Power 710+ and Power 730+ systems versus more expandable 4U Power 720+ and Power 740+ systems:

The interesting bit in that chart for me is the ISV and application count. Back when the AS/400 business peaked in the late 1990s, just as it was about to be transformed into the iSeries by ex-CEO Sam Palmisano as he took over Big Blue, the company had about 8,500 software partners and something on the order of 28,000 individual applications certified on OS/400. And today, as you add up IBM i, AIX, and Linux applications and partners on the modern Power Systems, the base is still smaller than the AS/400 ecosystem was back then. I am not surprised by this, and it just goes to show how entrenched Windows on X86 servers have become in the enterprise in the past 15 years.

Here's how IBM reckons the new Power7+ entry machines rank over their entry Power7 system predecessors:

Those comparisons are based on IBM's rPerf relative performance metrics for AIX and U.S. list prices, presumably for preconfigured Express setups. The rPerf metric for AIX is a variant of the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark test, just like the Commercial Processing Workload (CPW) benchmark that is used to gauge performance on OS/400 and IBM i workloads. So your mileage will vary on CPW, but it will generally track on entry and midrange systems.

Here's another foil to make it clear how to keep the 2U and 4U entry machines straight in your head:

Just in case you didn't notice, if you want a tower server--the equivalent of a data center for a lot of SMB shops--then the Power 720+ is your one and only option. Once again, the 2U boxes are being pitched at basic web infrastructure workloads and are priced to compete against similar Xeon E5-2600 iron, while the 4U boxes are aimed at customers needing a database server or an ERP box with more memory and storage expansion.

This handy little table shows how IBM wants its reseller and software partners to position the various machines against prior Power-based boxes and their RISC/Unix and X86 alternatives:

In this case, IBM is explaining how the entry and the midrange Power7+ machines are positioned against their predecessors and alternatives. If you are an IBM i shop on an earlier Power6 or Power6+ box with a single processors socket, then the Power 720+ is your box, and it is also the one IBM wants to pitch as an alternative to the Power 710+ and Power 730+ in deals against X86 iron if memory, disk, and I/O expandability are important. IBM is pitching the Power 740+ as a downgrade option for customers with older Power 550 midrange boxes. The bigger Power 750+ machines are being pitched against their Unix alternatives from Oracle running Solaris and from Hewlett-Packard running HP-UX, and both the Power 750+ and the fatter Power 760+ are being positioned as an alternative to earlier Power 570 boxes and as a consolidation box for a bunch of smaller Power5 through Power6+ boxes.

This chart paints a similar picture for the four entry Power7+ boxes:

I keep thinking as I read this that I wish all of the machines were priced to target X86 machines, as IBM puts it, and all of the same expandability and aggressive processor feature pricing that is in the Power 710+ and Power 730+ were available in the Power 720+ and Power 740+ machines. The good news, as I have shown in the past few weeks, is that IBM is only charging a slight premium on the four-core Power 720+ relative to the Power 710+ when you load up IBM i on it. But still, I think that IBM should charge the premium for the chassis, not the processor feature card and processor core activations. That is just another kind of tax on IBM i customers who need I/O expandability. It is almost enough to drive customers to external SAN arrays with flash acceleration attached to Power 710+ and Power 730+ iron.

And that may, in fact, be the intent. Either way, you will pay. The question is, what is the cheapest SAN storage that can run natively on IBM i 7.1 and attach to the Power 710+ machine. And the next question I have for you is why you can't cluster two Power 710+ machines, each in a P05 software tier, in an active-active cluster across the SAN instead having one bigger eight-core P10 box which costs a lot more money. The savings could be substantial, even with clustering software and you get a more resilient system to boot.

Resellers are also being asked to pursue upgrades as well as new system sales, and the Power 520 machines using Power6 processors running at 4.2 GHz and 4.7 GHz, which deliver around 4,300 CPWs and 4,750 CPWs of oomph per core, respectively. The new Power7+ chips spinning at 3.6 GHz deliver 28,400 CPWs across four cores, or something on the order of 7,100 CPWs per core, so even with a big clock speed drop, all that extra cache and the much-better Power7+ core will deliver 50 to 65 percent more OLTP performance per core. This is a big jump in value, obviously. Even the older Power7 processors running at 3 GHz in the Power 720s, delivering around 6,000 CPWs per core, will beat those old Power 520 and even older System i M15 and M25 boxes by somewhere between 26 to 40 percent more OLTP oomph per core.

With the Power 720s being three years old, and these other Power6 boxes in the Power 520 class being as much as five years old, these are the obvious candidates for an upgrade. And IBM will, as usual, be explaining that maintenance is a lot cheaper on the new boxes than on the older ones, such as in a promotional effort for BPs that IBM is calling Blue Sweep. When you add in lower power consumption of the Power 720+ compared to the Power 520, the numbers can be quiet large over a 36-month span:

It is enough to help cover the costs of an upgrade, and you get a much faster system as part of the deal.

We'll be reaching out to BPs to see what kind of sales pitch they are putting together to get customers to move to new Power7+ entry machines, including the four rack and one tower servers as well as the Flex p260+ node in the Flex System chassis. 

By: Timothy Prickett Morgan 

Source: http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh031813-story01.html

IBM Adds OpenStack to Cloud Portfolio

IBM announced private cloud software built on OpenStack, and said it would base all its cloud services and software on an open cloud architecture.

BM joins a growing number of vendors that have announced private cloud platforms built around the open-source OpenStack project. Until now IBM's cloud services have been built on its WebSphere family of cloud computing and application-integration products, running on top of traditional IBM hardware, including mainframes running z/OS.

Last week, IBM announced it would convert all its cloud services and software to be based on "an open cloud architecture." The first iteration is a private-cloud service based on OpenStack, the open-source cloud platform that has been growing in popularity against stiff competition from VMware's vCloud Director and vCloud Suite.

The product, named IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator, is designed to let customers build their own private clouds using an interface that IBM describes as "an orchestrator that can automate application deployment and lifecycle management in the cloud: compute, storage and network configuration, human tasks automation, integration with third party tools, all delivered by a single cloud management platform." IBM is a platinum member of the OpenStack Foundation, which oversees the development of the OpenStack code.
The SmartCloud Orchestrator software is in beta. IBM says the full product will be available later this year. IBM is running an open beta program for those interested in the software.
IBM isn't the only vendor offering OpenStack-based platforms. In October 2012, Cisco Systems announced a Cisco Edition of OpenStack. Meanwhile Citrix Systems has rebranded its CloudStack implementation, which was derived from OpenStack, as CloudPlatform. And Rackspace last week announced OpenCenter, a new GUI for its own OpenStack private cloud package dubbed Rackspace Private Cloud.
IBM is combining its cloud services with an effort to ride big data – the other all-consuming trend in technology this year – to more combined sales. In addition to adding software to let customers manage their own clouds and data, IBM is leaping into social networking and big-data analytics in conjunction with its cloud offerings. IBM is packaging a set of applications designed to help companies use social networks to recruit new employees, and another set to design, publish and monitor the success of marketing campaigns on social networks.
It will also combine its new Social Media Publisher with a set of analytics it bundles under the name IBM Connections 4.5 – which includes document management, content management and a menu of analytics designed to glean insight from masses of social-network data.
It will also ship a version of the groupware formerly known as Lotus Notes as the IBM Notes and Domino Social Edition 9, which it bills as "the industry's first truly social email client."
The overall strategy is to deliver a variety of services designed to make it easy for customers to build big-data analytic capabilities and save money by deploying them on clouds http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/39133.wss certified by IBM as secure and business-application friendly.
IBM is using both cloud and open source to zero in on its traditional customers: IT people and business execs who need functional, reliable technology without going to the delay or expense of building it themselves. "IBM is focused on industrializing this cloud platform to drive business innovation around key enterprise applications," according to Erich Clementi, SVP of IBM Global Technology Services.

By: Kevin Fogarty
Source: http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-generation-data-center/servers/ibm-adds-openstack-to-cloud-portfolio/240150499

A Letter from the Chairman, President and CEO

Dear IBM investor,

I am pleased to report that in 2012, IBM achieved record operating earnings per share, record free cash flow and record profit margins, with revenues that were flat at constant currency. Operating earnings per share were up 13 percent, putting us well on track to our 2015 Road Map objective of at least $20 of operating earnings per share. Importantly, we continued to deliver value to you, our owners.

This performance is a testament to our strategic position and capabilities, the discipline of our management systems, and the dedication and expertise of more than 430,000 IBMers around the world. Importantly, it reflects the impact of a distinct choice we have made about IBM’s business and technology model.
IBM is an innovation company. Both in what we do and in how we do it, we pursue continuous transformation—always remixing to higher value in our portfolio and skills, in the capabilities we deliver to our clients and in our own operations and management practices.
This is not the only path to success in our industry, and it is not the easiest one. But it is ours. In this letter, I will report on our 2012 results, and then put them in context of our model of continuous transformation.

Results in 2012

Earnings per share: Diluted operating earnings per share in 2012 were $15.25, a new record. This marked 10 straight years of double-digit EPS growth.
Margins: IBM’s operating pre-tax income margin rose for the 10th consecutive year—to 22.2 percent, up 12 points since 2000.
Cash flow: IBM has consistently generated strong cash flow, a key indicator of real business performance. In 2012 our free cash flow was $18.2 billion, a record for IBM and $12 billion higher than a decade ago. We ended 2012 with $11.1 billion of cash and marketable securities.
Revenue and income: Our revenue in 2012 was $104.5 billion, down 2 percent as reported and flat at constant currency. We grew operating net income by 8 percent, to $17.6 billion, our highest ever.
Investment and return to shareholders: In 2012 we invested $3.7 billion for 11 acquisitions in key areas of software and services; $4.3 billion in net capital expenditures; and $6.3 billion in R&D. We were able to return $15.8 billion to you—$12 billion through share repurchases and $3.8 billion through dividends. Last year’s dividend increase was 13 percent, marking the 17th year in a row in which we have raised our dividend, and the 97th consecutive year in which we have paid one.
Since 2000, we have added $14.6 billion to IBM’s operating pre-tax profit base, and increased our pre-tax income 1.7 times, our operating earnings per share 3.6 times and our free cash flow 1.7 times. Cumulatively, we have generated about $150 billion of free cash flow.

Generating Higher Value at IBM

IBM’s Model: Continuous Transformation

In an industry characterized by a relentless cycle of innovation and commoditization, one model for success is that of the commodity player—winning through low price, efficiency and economies of scale. Ours is a different choice: the path of innovation, reinvention and shift to higher value.

We remix to higher value: We do so in our portfolio, in our organic R&D investment, and through targeted acquisitions and divestitures.

• We remix our research and development: Two decades ago, 70 percent of our researchers were working in materials science, hardware and related technology. Even the one-in-ten working in software were focused on operating systems and compilers. Today, 60 percent are in fields that support our key growth initiatives, such as the 400 mathematicians developing algorithms for business analytics, as well as a diverse group of specialists that include medical doctors, computational biologists, experts in natural language processing, and weather and climate forecasters. Since the beginning of 2010, we have spent $19 billion on R&D, and in 2012 IBM earned the most U.S. patents for the 20th straight year, with a record total of 6,478.
• We acquire new capabilities: Organizations run into trouble when they look to fulfill a new strategy or provide the basis for transformation through acquisitions. We practice a disciplined approach that asks three questions: Does it build on or extend a capability IBM already has? Does the company have scalable intellectual property? Can it take advantage of our reach into 170 countries? Our balanced formula has built a strong track record since 2000, with more than 140 acquisitions.
• We divest nonstrategic assets: Always moving to the future isn’t just about what you invent. It also involves choices about when to move on. Over the past decade we have divested almost $15 billion of annual revenue—businesses that no longer fit our strategy. If we had not done so, we would be a larger company today, but with lower margins and capabilities less essential to our clients.

2012 Performance

($ in billions except per share amounts)

For the year ended December 31:	2012
Operating earnings per share	$ 15.25
Revenue	$104.50
Operating net income	$ 17.60
Free cash flow	$ 18.20
Returned to shareholders	$ 15.80

We make markets: We create new markets by category, by geography and by client.

• We make markets by category: Our software and services businesses today look very different from just a few years ago, offering new solution categories like MobileFirst, Social Business and Smarter Commerce. In our hardware business, momentum is building for our new PureSystems family, which launched the new category of workload-optimized systems. PureSystems has seen more than 2,300 installations in more than 70 countries in just two quarters.
• We make markets by geography: We are achieving strong results in the world’s growth markets, working closely with businesses, institutions and governments as they seek to modernize their infrastructures and societies. We opened 144 new branches in these markets in 2012. We also continue remixing to more profitable opportunities in these countries, through Smarter Planet solutions such as Smarter Transportation, Smarter Finance and Smarter Cities.
• We make markets by client: We unlock new opportunity within our existing client base by creating capabilities for a new generation of IT buyers—from chief marketing officer to chief financial officer to the head of human resources and more. I discuss this in greater depth below.

We reinvent core franchises: Our System z enterprise server, introduced in 2012, is just the latest reinvention of the mainframe, and it drove System z’s largest capacity shipment ever during the fourth quarter—with more than half of that growth coming from Linux workloads. Core software platforms such as WebSphere have been entirely transformed. And Information Technology Services, which was once a significant reseller of others’ technology—generating good revenue but low margins—has shifted significantly to high-value services such as data center energy efficiency, security, and business continuity and recovery. This has contributed to a 6-point pre-tax income margin improvement in services since 2000.

We remix our skills and expertise: An innovation model means continuously remixing and deepening our expertise. For example, over the past three years we have increased our skill base in analytics by more than 8,100 experts. We have also added nearly 9,500 sellers in key areas of industry expertise—such as healthcare, energy, telecom and banking, as well as emerging sectors such as metals and mining. This year, IBM Global Business Services and IBM Research will launch the IBM Client Experience Lab, as well as joint GBS and Software practices in social business and mobility—including a tripling of our skill base in social and mobile technologies and doubling our skill base in Smarter Commerce.

We reinvent the enterprise itself: We have been highly disciplined about driving productivity—through the adoption of common, shared operations and systems; the streamlining of enterprise‑wide processes; and the leveraging of global skills—all in the service of global integration. And we are now taking the next step, becoming a Smarter Enterprise:

• In part, this means applying analytics to every part of our business—changing how we manage risk, drive efficiency, increase marketing effectiveness and infuse business insight across the company.
• In part, it means using social technologies to identify IBM experts and enable them to deliver their knowledge and leverage our entire portfolio to create a seamless, software-value client experience.

This ongoing transformation gives us confidence that we will achieve our goal of $8 billion in productivity savings over the course of our 2015 Road Map. Sixty percent of our productivity savings are reinvested in the business.

Revenue Increase for IBM Growth Initiatives in 2012

For the year ended December 31:	2012
Smarter Planet	25%
Business Analytics	13%
Cloud	80%
Growth Markets	7%*
* at constant currency

We use our strong cash flow strategically: Our cash flow generation fuels reinvestment in the business—in R&D, capital expenditures and acquisitions. At the same time, we deliver consistently strong returns to you, our owners.

A New Era of Computing

To sustain an innovation model in our industry, a company must do more than accommodate major technology shifts. It must lead them. IBM has done this repeatedly over the past century—not only pioneering new technology models, but capturing significant economic value.

Today, another new wave is sweeping in—powered by Big Data, analytics, mobile, social and cloud. We anticipated this several years ago with our point of view on building a Smarter Planet—a world that was becoming instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. Now, the IT environment is moving from monolithic applications to dynamic services; from structured data at rest to unstructured data in motion; from PCs to unprecedented numbers and kinds of devices; from stable to unpredictable workloads; from static infrastructure to cloud services; and from proprietary standards to open innovation.

This shift plays strongly to IBM’s historic position in enterprise computing. So we are, as we have so often done in the past, reshaping our investment, innovation and market strategies to lead.

We see three defining characteristics of this new era—what we call Smarter Computing:

1. Smarter Computing is designed for Big Data. Every two days, as much data is now generated as in all of human history up to 2003. This is “Big Data,” and it constitutes a vast new natural resource that can revolutionize industries and societies—with the right technology, capable of analyzing and extracting value and insight from it. This is one reason IBM’s analytics business is growing so strongly, as we work with clients to drive intelligence into every aspect of their operations. Indeed, we have raised our 2015 Road Map target for Business Analytics from $16 billion to $20 billion of revenue. We are also rapidly advancing the marketplace applications for our breakthrough “cognitive” computing system, Watson, which is already demonstrating its potential to transform healthcare and finance. We will introduce our first commercial Watson offerings this year.

To sustain an innovation model in our industry, a company must do more than accommodate major technology shifts.

2. Smarter Computing is built on software-defined environment. To handle today’s volume, velocity and variety of data, enterprise data centers must become more dynamic and flexible. One way to think about this is to imagine entire IT infrastructures that are as programmable as individual systems. This new model is known as the “software-defined environment,” and cloud computing is its first manifestation. However, it will not be the last. This new model optimizes the entire computing “stack”—compute, storage and network resources—so that it can adapt to the type of work required. Hardware built for these new environments will be of significant business value—exemplified by IBM’s systems today. From System z, to Power Systems, to storage, to our new PureSystems family, IBM systems are software-defined.

3. Smarter Computing is open. Only through open standards and platforms can enterprises support an expanding universe of heterogeneous data, devices and services, and engage in today’s rich innovation ecosystems. The challenge is how to turn open approaches into successful business. IBM helped do so with Linux, Eclipse and Apache, supporting their growth into standards with vital industry ecosystems, and then developing high-value IBM business on top of them. Today, we are repeating this strategy through a number of collaborations such as OpenStack, a new open source cloud platform; Hadoop, an open source platform for Big Data; and several promising open source hardware projects.

Taken together, computing that is open, software-defined, and designed for Big Data constitutes a profound shift in information technology. And as in prior such shifts, it will create new markets and new clients. We are pursuing them aggressively.

New Clients, New Markets

As I mentioned, to capture the opportunities opened up by this new era of technology, IBM is engaging with new kinds of clients as we make new markets in Big Data/analytics, cloud for the enterprise, emerging economies and Smarter Planet. Indeed, from a business perspective, Smarter Planet is a platform for a growing array of new markets—such as Smarter Commerce, Smarter Cities and Social Business—and these new markets take concrete shape through the engagement and enablement of a new generation of IT clients. Today, we are working around the world and across multiple industries with many new leaders.

Perhaps the most active among them in embracing the new era of technology have been chief marketing officers, who are looking to reinvent the practice of marketing—for example, by understanding and enabling customers as individuals, rather than “segments.” This helped our Global Business Services Smarter Commerce signings grow by nearly 200 percent in 2012—reaching $2 billion.

At the same time, chief procurement officers are expected to increase their annual investment in Supplier Intelligence by 30 percent through 2015, as they reshape their global supply chains. And leaders of human resources are investing in analytics to build smarter workforces and social enterprises. One analyst has ranked IBM as number one in enterprise social business for the past three years.

“Front-office” transformation has the potential to fuel the biggest wave of business technology investment since the era of enterprise resource planning.

City mayors are deploying Intelligent Operations Centers to transform public services in Davao, Philippines; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Miami-Dade County, Florida. And urban transportation managers, such as those in Singapore and Eindhoven, Netherlands, are reducing urban congestion by offering drivers alternate route recommendations in exchange for their cars’ data on braking, acceleration and location.

This list could go on. “Front-office” transformation has the potential to fuel the biggest wave of business technology investment since the era of enterprise resource planning (ERP). And that creates a powerful set of conditions for the tens of thousands of business advisors and industry experts embedded in the world’s greatest engine of technical innovation.

In sum, our strong strategic positioning, solid balance sheet, recurring revenue, robust profit streams, global reach—and especially our institutional capacity for innovation and continuous transformation—give us confidence that we will continue to provide differentiating value to our clients, employees, partners and communities—and therefore to you, our owners. “Generating Higher Value at IBM” summarizes how.

On Being Essential

In closing, let me say a few words on the deeper meaning of this model of continuous transformation to higher value, at this particular moment in history.

As I have noted, an innovation model does not present an easy path, especially in an industry as fast-changing as ours. But once you are clear on your choice, it shapes everything you do: your business strategy, how you recruit talent, how you develop skills, how you invent, how you run the company. And for IBM, it means something more.

It speaks to IBMers’ aspiration to be essential to each of our vital constituencies—our clients, our communities, our partners, our investors, and one another. We see this as our purpose as an enterprise—to serve their plans for success, their need to transform and their own unique sense of purpose.

The era opening before us offers a historic opportunity for both businesses and societies to pursue this higher purpose. A vast new natural resource is being unleashed—promising to do for our century what steam, electricity and fossil fuels did for the Industrial Age. The economic and societal potential of this new gusher of data is incalculable. It is the opportunity of our lifetime—and IBMers are determined to seize it.

It is in this spirit that I express my deep pride in the worldwide IBM team for bringing us to where we are, and my gratitude to you, our shareholders, for your unwavering support. I hope you share our excitement about your company’s performance and the way in which IBMers are building a smarter planet and a brighter future.

Virginia M. Rometty, CHAIRMAN, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER 

 

Source: http://www.ibm.com/annualreport/2012/letter-from-the-chairman.html

 

 

IBM and DARPA Create A New Optical Link For Super Computers

The supercomputers of tomorrow will be capable of feats never thought possible: model global climate change, run molecular-level simulations of entire microscopic cells, design nanostructures and more, all very quickly. In fact, thee team behind these exascale computers are planning to break previous the energy efficiency record by over half.

They plan to do this, "By combining innovative circuits in IBM's 32-nanometer silicon-on-insulator complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (SOI CMOS) technology with advanced vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) and photodetectors fabricated by Sumitomo Electric Device Innovations USA (formerly Emcore)," says Jonathan E. Proesel, an IBM team member. They have essentially made an optical communication link operating at 25 gigabits per second using just 24 milliwatts of total wall-plug power, or 1 pJ/bit.

By: Wiza

Source: http://www.warp2search.net/news/story/ibm_and_darpa_create_a_new_optical_link_for_super_computers.html

IBM Worklight...with a B2E application center

Two weeks ago we launched IBM MobileFirst -- a set of six solution portfolios unifying IBM's market-leading mobile enterprise story. One of the portfolios is an application platform, and the centerpiece of that is IBM Worklight. In my first month with the team, what I've learned is that Worklight addresses the need for reusability in mobile apps better than any other approach. While we offer many ways to deliver mobile web applications, Worklight is designed for web, hybrid, and native apps, across the entire spectrum of mobile devices.

I'm already carrying two sample Worklight apps around on my iPhone -- one is a banking app, the other a consumer insurance solution. Interestingly, I didn't install them from the Apple app store; instead, they came from an IBM application center. In a business-to-enterprise scenario, Worklight's built-in secure direct distribution vehicle becomes a critically important component of app delivery. App distribution is controlled within the organization.

In the 3-minute YouTube video posted above, the concept of the Worklight Application Center is explained.

The Application Center, and the model of being able to directly distribute apps, is important in the enterprise where app prototyping and deployment may take place in rapid cycles. There's no need to worry about submission to public app stores, nor worry about your internal apps being available externally. The Application Center provides all the mechanics, and operates as simply as the official app stores do.

One of the key value propositions of Worklight is code reuse. We expect companies that adopt Worklight to do so as a platform, building out a set of apps. Using the Application Center, deploying them is straightforward, and a worthwhile infrastructure component. 

By: Ed Brill

Source: http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/ibm-worklight...with-a-b2e-application-center

IBM’s “Ginni” Rometty Predicts Three Ways Technology Will Transform The Future Of Business

Big Data, analytics, the cloud, mobile and social technologies are transforming our working world.  This new era of computing provides the instrumentation, interconnection and intelligence that make it possible to build a smarter connected. But, in order to do so, countries, cities, corporations and individuals need to rethink how they go about achieving their goals. On your mind, should be, how will shifts in technology impact the way businesses are run?.  Virginia ‘Ginni’ Rometty, the first female CEO of IBM, thinks it will change everything.

Prior to becoming president and CEO in January 2012 she held the position of Senior Vice President and Group Executive for Sales, Marketing, and Strategy at IBM. She has been named to Fortune magazine’s “50 Most Powerful Women in Business” for eight consecutive years, ranking #1 for 2012, and she was ranked #15 on Forbes magazine’s “World’s 100 Most Powerful Women” for the same year. She was also named to the Time 100 in 2012, and was included in the 50 Most Influential list of Bloomberg Markets Magazine in September 2012.

Speaking at an event organized by the nonprofit Council on Foreign Relations, Rometty predicted that data will be the basis of competitive advantage going forward, calling it the “the next natural resource.” She believes it will change how decisions are made, how value is created and how value is delivered.

Data will be the basis of competition in the ‘smarter’ era.  She says, “Big Data is the next natural resource – promising to do in the 21ist Century what steam, electricity and oil did for the 20TH.   In our time, everyone will have access to data… to cloudinfrastructures… to mobile devices… to social networks. What will determine winners and losers?. How do management and organizations – not just technology – need to evolve?.”

She presented three principles of change:

Principle 1: Decisions will be based not on “gut instinct,” but on predictive analytics.

“We need to do this for two reasons. First, we can. Every two days, we now generate the equivalent of all of the data that existed up to 2003. And thanks to advanced computation and analytics, we have the tools to turn that  data into insight, knowledge and better decisions. The second reason to embrace analytics is because we must. The way we make decisions today too often leads to bad outcomes.”

Rometty believes that those companies that are able to use data to their advantage will make better, more objective calls. As an example, she cited IBM’s use of software analytics in its CRUSH (Criminal Reduction Utilizing Statistical History) initiative with the Memphis Police Department.

Principle 2: The social network is the new production line. 

“In a world where value is shifting rapidly from things to knowledge, knowledge workers
are the new means of production. And it follows that the social network is the new
production line. This is important. In a social enterprise, your value is established not by how much knowledge you amass, but by how much knowledge you impart to others.
We are in early days of this shift. But some pioneers are changing how they actually
create value.”

This social sharing shift will change the way businesses hire, who they hire and how they reward workers. I have criticized Klout in the past, does this imply Klout matters?.

Principle 3: Value will be created not for “market segments” or demographics, but
for individuals.

“Whether we are companies reaching customers, governments engaging citizens,
hospitals and their patients, universities and students… In truth, all of us have
understood and served, at best, segments of populations. 

When you look closely, you see that personalization isn’t mostly resulting in better
marketing. People are not clamoring for more of that. What’s happening instead is that
marketing is being replaced by service, by useful assets, by value. In exchange for their
data – who they are, what they’re looking for, even where they are standing or driving at
this moment – they expect some kind of benefit in return… whether as customers, or
patients, or students, or citizens.”

Rometty attributes “the third wave of technology” as possibly contributing to this individualized approach. In the first era of computing, computers counted. In the second, they could be programmed to perform instructions. In the next future, computers will learn by themselves, she said. “That’s the wave that starts now.”

Rometty remains optimistic. “We have, in Big Data, a vast new natural resource,
as well as the means to mine it for value. And that is unleashing not only insight and
knowledge, but new ways of creating business and societal value… and new ways of
working that are more flexible, innovative, collaborative, humane.”

By: Hayden Richards

Source: http://www.intelligenthq.com/intelligence/ibms-ginni-rometty-predicts-three-ways-technology-will-transform-the-future-of-business/

IBM Makes a Big Bet on OpenStack in the Cloud

The open source software for running cloud computing installations just got a big new name in its camp: IBM.

Big Blue announced today that all of its cloud services and software will be based on an open cloud architecture. It’s good news for potential IBM customers because it means they can mix and match service and equipment vendors — Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Rackspace are also big OpenStack fans — without worrying about getting stuck with one.

Its first move will be to spin up a private cloud service based on OpenStack. There’s also some new software, specifically something called IBM SmartCloud Monitoring Application Insight, that’s aimed at monitoring the progress and availability of cloud applications. There are also two other applications coming out, but they’re in beta.

While IBM isn’t the biggest player in the area of cloud services — right now, it’s Amazon’s Web Services — it has been gearing up for a big push into the business, sensing an opportunity. And there is an opportunity: Gartner says the market for cloud services this year will total $131 billion. And while there will certainly be some purists who sniff that “private clouds” aren’t real clouds, the fact is that IBM has about 5,000 customers running their own clouds, or in a mixed public-private environment. These hybrid cloud arrangements are something IBM has been talking about for a few years now.

Looking back in history, it appears that this sort of backing by IBM can have a significant effect. In 2000, Big Blue backed Linux, the open source operating system, as a critical piece of its systems business. A year later, it invested $1 billion in the Linux movement. IBM’s seal of approval over time helped Linux gain acceptance and credibility in big businesses.

For the cloud, it will help nudge the industry toward an accepted standard. A Booz & Company study found that efforts to set standards and craft a working set of best practices for cloud computing has been, at best, fragmented. In its current state, the study argues, with numerous inconsistent and incompatible standards, cloud services won’t evolve, and companies won’t get the benefits they need.

“Everyone is talking about the cloud, but in order for it to have real scale and impact, it’s pretty clear that standards and open source are going to be pretty important,” says Angel Diaz, IBM’s vice president for software standards, open source and high-performance computing. “Without standards, the cloud is going to be complex, not simple, and clients will be stuck with one vendor.”

Ann Winblad, a venture capitalist and a managing director of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, a firm that has had a long-term investment interest in open source software and open standards, and has backed companies like Plumgrid and Sonatype, says that OpenStack has essentially become the operating system for the cloud. “I think the trend here is that OpenStack has won the race to become the standard, and it has done it rapidly,” Winblad said. “We’ve made some investments around the software-defined data center, and OpenStack is a key component. It is the OS for the cloud.”

A few other things IBM is doing: It has created a 400-member customer council devoted to cloud standards. The council initially started with only 40 members. It’s also backing the OpenStack Foundation as a platinum member, and contributing a lot of code to OpenStack projects. And it is backing other OpenStack-related standards, like one called Open Service for Lifecycle Collaboration which aims to make it easier to manage software over time, and to use multiple tools for the job together.

By: Arik Hesseldahl

Source: http://allthingsd.com/20130304/ibm-makes-a-big-bet-on-openstack-in-the-cloud/

inShare.3 IBM Exec: PureSystems Sales Off To 'Solid Start'

IBM (NYSE:IBM) executives are expressing satisfaction with first-year sales for the company's PureSystems line of converged infrastructure systems, a product line that is key to the vendor's future in the computer hardware arena.

IBM sold more than 2,300 PureSystems in 2012 following its April debut, said Rod Adkins, senior vice president of IBM's Systems and Technology Group, speaking at the company's PartnerWorld Leadership Conference in Las Vegas.

Adkins' statement is the first time IBM has given any sales numbers for the PureSystems product line.

[Related: Dell, Cisco Partner With VMware Horizon View On Converged Infrastructure VDI Solutions]

"I think we're off to a solid start," Adkins said during a keynote speech Wednesday. In an exclusive interview with CRN after his speech, Adkins said PureSystems sales appeared to gain momentum in the fourth calendar quarter.

"I think that's trending and the direction we're looking for," he said. "I like the track that it's on and we're well-positioned to leverage the momentum we created coming out of the fourth quarter into 2013."

Adkins said there are 2,555 IBM Systems and Technology Group partners selling PureSystems. The 2,300 systems were sold in 70 countries, he added.

IBM launched PureSystems to compete with converged infrastructure systems from Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and VCE, the latter a joint venture created by Cisco, EMC and VMware. The IBM PureSystems line includes the PureFlex System for Infrastructure-as-a-Service deployments, PureApplication System for Platform-as-a-Service tasks, and PureData System for big data applications.

Several channel partners had told CRN last week that PureSystems sales had gotten off to a slow start. Because it is a new category of product, Adkins said IBM "knew there would be a time factor associated with [gaining] market traction and momentum."

During a panel discussion of the managed service provider market on Tuesday, Andrew Monshaw, general manager of IBM PureFlex, said that most PureSystems sales so far have been to large companies and managed service providers.

Adkins also said about one-half of the PureSystems sales were to new customers and were not bought by customers simply to replace other IBM servers.

Earlier this month IBM debuted an entry-level PureApplication System for Web and database applications, and improved the performance of the PureData System. Adkins said IBM is assembling specific editions of the PureSystems line for MSPs, and developing new management and deployment capabilities for the IBM Flex System architecture that the PureSystems line is based on. 

By: Rick Whiting

Source: http://www.crn.com/news/data-center/240149635/ibm-exec-puresystems-sales-off-to-solid-start.htm

IBM Increases Big Data Forecast

IBM has increased its revenue target forecast for big data, reflecting its snowballing momentum.

IBM chairman, president and CEO Ginni Rometty used the annual investor briefing to reveal that Big Blue is increasing its previously stated 2015 revenue target for analytics and big data from $16 billion (£10.5bn) to $20 billion (£13.2bn).

Business analytics is one of IBM’s strategic growth initiatives – along with cloud computing, Smarter Planet and emerging Growth Markets – that are key drivers of growth and profit within IBM’s 2015 operating earnings per share (EPS) roadmap objective of at least $20 (£13).

Strategic Directions

At the investor briefing, which was held 28 February in San Jose, Calif., Rometty outlined three strategic directions for IBM. One is IBM’s model of continuous transformation as the company continues to remix to higher value, high-margin businesses, acquiring new capabilities through acquisitions, divesting of non-strategic assets and focusing R&D on growth initiatives like big data and analytics. This makes markets through new categories, geographies and clients; reinvents its core businesses and skill levels; and continues to generate the strong cash flow to fund the transformation, IBM said.

The second strategic direction is IBM is embarking on a new era of computing – Smarter Computing – driven by the rise of Big Data and analytics, mobile, social and cloud technologies; built on software-defined environments and based on open platforms.

And as its third area of strategic focus, IBM is making new markets and engaging with new front-office clients – such as Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs), Chief Procurement Officers, heads of Human Resources, and city leaders – that IBM is serving.

The investor briefing took place at IBM’s Almaden Research Center and Big Blue opened up the lab to investors to showcase some of its prized research projects that are likely to soon result in products or further scientific breakthroughs.

On the continuous transformation front, since 2010 IBM announced or closed 35 acquisitions for around $12 billion (£8bn) and divested of non-strategic assets. Indeed, over the past decade IBM divested almost $15 billion (£9.9bn) of revenue, divesting its PC group, its printing systems division and retail store point-of-sale business, among others – businesses that no longer fit IBM’s strategy. If IBM had not done these divestments it would be a larger company today, but with lower margins and capabilities less essential to its clients.

Moreover, IBM has had a long history of remixing research and development. Today 60 percent of IBM researchers are in fields that support its key growth initiatives, such as 400 mathematicians developing algorithms for business analytics.

Meanwhile, Smarter Planet is spawning Smarter Commerce, Smarter Cities and Social Business focuses. IBM opened 144 new branches in growth markets in 2012, for a total of 285, where the company sees continued profitable growth through solutions such as Smarter Transportation and Smarter Finance. And over the last three years IBM has increased its skills base in analytics by 8,100, while the company also added nearly 9,500 sellers with expertise in sectors such as healthcare, energy, telecom and banking, plus metals and mining and assigned 5,000 consultants to its new Globally Integrated Enterprise practice in GBS.

Data Growth

Also, in reinventing the IBM enterprise, IBM applied analytics to manage risk, drive efficiency, and increase marketing effectiveness. Big Blue also used social technologies to match IBM experts in high-value client engagements – on target to achieve its goal of $8 billion (£5.3bn) in productivity savings over the 2015 Road Map, with 60 percent of these savings reinvested in the business.

With the new era of computing IBM has seen and been intimately involved in enterprise computing’s move from monolithic applications to dynamic services, from structured data to unstructured data in motion, from standard client devices to an unprecedented number and variety of devices, from stable workloads to unpredictable workloads, from static infrastructure to cloud services, and from proprietary standards to open standards.

Also for its part, IBM said its Smarter Computing initiative is designed for big data. As data grows in volume, velocity and variety it can revolutionise clients’ decision making, IBM said. IBM’s analytics business is growing strongly – with its new target of $20 billion by 2015. And it is rapidly advancing the marketplace applications of Watson’s cognitive computing capabilities. The first commercial offering of Watson was announced in the first half of 2013.

In addition IBM Smarter Computing is built on software-defined environments. Cloud computing, which grew 80 percent at IBM last year, is the first manifestation, but software defined environments are bigger than cloud, able to adapt to constantly changing workloads and demands. And unbeknownst to many, IBM hardware such as System z, Power, Pure Systems and storage systems are all software-defined, IBM said. Moreover, Smarter Computing is open. IBM supports such open platforms as Linux, Eclipse and Apache and is involved with open efforts such as OpenStack, Hadoop and new cores.

Meanwhile regarding new clients and markets, front-office transformation is the biggest wave of business change since ERP, IBM said. And Big Blue is targeting the CMO. IBM Global Business Solutions’ Smarter Commerce signing grew nearly 200 percent in 2012. IBM has been working with hundreds of CMOs to apply technology from acquisitions like Unica, SPSS, CoreMetric and TeaLeaf to transform marketing.

IBM also is going after CPOs and HR leads. Industry analysts predict CPOs will increase annual investment in supplier intelligence by 30 percent through 2015; reinventing global supply chain. And IBM has been number one in enterprise social business for three straight years according to IDC.

By: Darryl K. Taft

Source: http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/ibm-big-data-forecast-109121