The
first IBM Enterprise2013 brought together IBM’s Enterprise Executive Summit,
the Power Systems Technical University and the System z Technical University on
a single site. This allowed attendees to pick from a range of detailed
technical sessions as complements to Executive-focused presentations of IBM solution
strategies, plans and customer stories. IBM
customers presented sessions and testimonials which detailed their successes
when working with IBM solutions, products, services and partners.
“Infrastructure
matters” was a unifying theme at this event, but that the solution is what
should drive its selection was a clear and consistent companion message. The sessions provided examples of cost
effective strategies and solutions that allow IT to resolve pressing enterprise
problems.
For
years, we’ve said: “Customers buy solutions that they believe will resolve
pressing problems or will allow them to accomplish their goals. Goals include: gaining competitive advantage, increasing
customer satisfaction, creating unique services, etc.” This was in reaction to ‘religious wars’ arguing
the universal supremacy of a singular technology or architecture. Such wars
wasted time and resources as they distracted IT talent from their role as a
creator of and contributor to enterprise success. IBM clearly endorses that
same message.
Problem
solving through the lens of a unique infrastructure (technology) resulted, all
too often, in a proliferation of incompatible, costly and underutilized
platforms. The results were costs for support, software licensing, operations
and maintenance that were significantly higher than necessary. There’s a reason
why 70% of most IT budgets are used for support, not development.
In
supporting the message and theme, Steve Mills turned to IBM’s own experience.
IBM’s evaluation of their own IT operations, led them (and Steve advised the
audience) to “eliminate, eliminate, eliminate” as in removing redundancies and
overlaps everywhere, in operations, applications, workloads, workflows, etc. It
includes process standardization and close attention to eliminating data center
sprawl. Corollary to those actions are simplification and automation.
Steve
also emphasized the point was not simply cost reduction and ROI. The focus has
to be on overall optimization of efforts by increasing productivity, efficiency
in operations, resource and asset utilization, based on the accurate
identification, allocation and accounting of costs.
The
choice of infrastructure remains important. As IBM made clear during the
sessions, selection of the right IT architecture both drives and creates
business value. Today’s dynamic, automated infrastructure allows creation of
new business models, facilitates business transformation, speeds competitive
innovation and helps to establish market leadership. It is the needs of the
enterprise (financial, market, competitive) along with workload (security,
reliability, elasticity, scalability, etc.) requirements that drive the
evaluation and choice of infrastructure.
IBM’s
advantage is that they are unique in offering the broadest range of
infrastructure platforms from the chip to the enterprise (mainframe) server.
All built with support for open standards and open environments. They also
uniquely offer a range of factory integrated solutions for specific workload
types and challenges. IBM focuses their solutions to address challenges related
to the Cloud, Big Data/Analytics and Security. These areas are currently or
emerging as presenting the most critical and pressing problems for enterprises
of all types. IBM introduced new solutions and innovations in its platforms,
ranging from System z to Power Systems to System x to storage.
The
presentations and announcements are available at IBM
Enterprise 2013[1]. And, we’ll be writing more
about what we heard and liked about the event.
For now,
we’ll close with a list of tips to achieve cost effective IT from Steve’s
presentation:
- Do not confuse price with cost
- Budgeting & charge back techniques can cause false economics
- Technology is a tool, not a religion…..insist on fact based analysis
- TCO cannot be overlooked, but neither can agility & effectiveness
- Elimination is the clearest path to saving money
The comprehensive migration solutions and the automated mapping of data between the target system and the source provided by your company help in successive data migration. It makes your company be one of the data migration service companies
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