By Rich Ptak
Deepak Advani, GM, Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure (the
expanded Tivoli software portfolio) teamed with Chris O’Connor, Vice President
of Strategy and Engineering to provide an overview of IBM”s new way of thinking
about service delivery and management, which are the result of advances in cloud
management, smarter infrastructure, increased access to analytics and pervasive
adoption of standards driving vendor interoperability. The combination will
exert its impact across multiple enterprise functions, and most especially, IT.
As a result, IBM is rethinking and redefining how it designs, delivers and
promotes its solutions. Let’s examine some of the thinking and how that
influences the group’s solutions.
At the event, there was considerable discussion devoted to delivering
the overarching message that IBM understands why, what and how the enterprise
needs to transform itself for success.
IBM points to its own transformation. And, they provided examples of a
significant number of enterprises they successfully helped to identify, select,
implement and benefit from transformation opportunities. At a management level,
IBM is working hard to establish itself as the preeminent trusted advisor and
partner for successful enterprise transformation.
But that message alone is insufficient. Ultimately, a
successful transformation depends upon the practitioner, who has the
responsibility for implementation and ongoing operations. The enterprise
practitioner role has traditionally been filled by some portion of the IT function,
typically a combination of developers, operators, administrators, etc.
Increasingly today, a critical element in decision making
and implementation includes someone from outside the IT function. It can be or
include a Line of Business manager, a sales team member or a representative of
another business function. Taking their cue from consumer experiences where new
technologies, proliferation of smarter infrastructure, pervasive availability
of mobile devices provide opportunities that were previously unimagined and
unimaginable, these ‘practitioners’ look for and make decisions from the
extraordinary performance and experience of consumer IT. Crossing functions,
these practical ‘practitioners’ look for opportunity and inspiration based on
interactive experiences.
PowerPoint presentations, sweet speeches and promises alone
are no longer trusted. With those, everything is wonderful until the service is
unavailable or crashes while exposing confidential data to the Internet. It’s
the reality of experience and interaction that makes the sale. IBM has to
demonstrate they are the best, not only at delivering services (IaaS,
PaaS and SaaS) and solutions for transformation, but also that they offer the
most effective, educational and innovative user experience to creatively apply
and utilize them.
That is where Deepak’s team is focused. Their task is to
provide practitioners personalized service portals for adaptive, seamless
access to resources. Practitioners want access to functions, data-based
insight, guidance and predictive problem avoidance as they strive to achieve
enterprise goals.
Of course, Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure team will
provide solutions. After all, IBM”s objective is to creatively combine all of
the broad, extensive power of the technology (i.e. cloud, Big Data/Analytics,
cognitive computing, virtualized, smarter infrastructure, etc.) with the
extensive experience gained in customer engagements to create an interface for
the user that makes using it easier, more intuitive, more effective to leverage
the solutions, products and services that IBM provides. That is the new,
critically important component that is driving Deepak and his team today.
We believe that IBM has a unique, insightful vision that is
significantly different from and advances well beyond feature/function obsessed
competitors. They are doing the hard work of integration, process creation and
refinement to put together role- and responsibility-based access to the power
of technology. The more enterprise workers that understand and comprehend what
can be done, the more the enterprise (and IBM) will benefit.
To that end, Deepak and his team will demonstrate (not just
say) that IBM is the partner that can help them to effectively and efficiently
exploit the capabilities inherent in cloud, mobile/endpoints, Big
Data/Analytics and smarter infrastructure. From the glimpses they provided, we
think their efforts will be enlightening, informative and appreciated by all parties.
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