IBM Gets It
This story in The New York Times today about IBM's successful change in strategy reveals that the traditional vendor understands the extraordinary disruptions the software industry faces, and plans to be right there to compete with vendors both new and old in the future.
The article largely concentrates on how IBM has responded to its rivals in Asia by hiring “aggressively in India to narrow the cost advantage of its offshore rivals in traditional technology services like operating data centers for customers and upgrading and maintaining their software.”
Beyond the services area and the acquisition of software companies, however, the past year has revealed that IBM’s philosophy about software has begun to evolve as new competitors like Google, who operate on more nimble SaaS models, create applications that enable collaboration across the enterprise. IBM has responded by designing its own Web 2.0-inspired software, including IBM Connections, a social software suite that brings thinks like blogs and wikis into the enterprise on IT friendly terms.
In some correspondences I traded with Wikinomics author Don Tapscott earlier this year, he said that IBM’s willingness to work with the open source community on Linux is a good example of how it embraces the 21st century model of openness as the key to innovation. And he points out, who would have expected this from the giant?
“IBM was an unlikely candidate to become a champion of peer production and a leader of the open world,” he says. “After all, we’re talking about Big Blue—the company that became huge by building and selling proprietary everything. A company that was insular and vertically integrated 15 years ago now partners extensively with the open-source community and is considered a positive force for collaboration and openness.”
In a way, IBM has done nothing more brilliant than the proverbial business philosophy of “listen to your customers.” A few months ago, when I spoke with Jeff Schick, IBM’s VP of social software, for my briefing on IBM Connections, he said, “Our marketplace observations about Web 2.0 technology and challenges facing businesses today are key. We did surveys to CEOs, and they say that collaborative innovation is the most important thing they need.”
The overall point of the Times article is clear: IBM is adapting reasonably well to change. Though the company has experienced some very unfortunate
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
