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  5. IBM's Continuing Information Infrastructure Journey: Page 4 of 4
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IBM's Continuing Information Infrastructure Journey: Page 4 of 4

IBM held its Information Infrastructure Analyst Summit in Boston last week, building on the initiative it launched a little over a year ago. While the original launch articulated IBM's direction, it was also very product oriented. This time, the Summit was primarily focused on strategy. Thus, product announcements can be separate and distinct, and can serve as instances of how IBM is actually executing according to its announced direction. But a direction -- in the sense of the vision of where a
DAVID HILL
November 02, 2009

IBM's Information Infrastructure Summit was designed to help analysts understand its thinking around current and future trends. Practically speaking, the company hopes to raise the conversation in businesses to the CXO level in order to have their customers understand the business reasons for having to optimize the information infrastructure. This would enable IBM to play off its breadth and depth in both products and services and avoid the individual product function/feature and price/performance comparisons. Individually, these may be more cost efficient, but collectively they may not deliver the overall business value that derives from using an integrated and unified set of products and services. 

I believe that IBM's challenge will be in convincing enterprises of the need for the high-level of conversation. The customers' challenge is to not take a myopic view of what needs to be done, making short-term, suboptimal decisions, but instead to take a longer view on maximizing the value IT can deliver to business processes. Optimizing the information infrastructure obviously will require the use of both current and emerging technologies in such areas as cloud computing, virtualization and archiving. An oldie but goodie technology in GPFS seems to be at the heart of IBM's strategy for the information infrastructure.

Obviously, all the technology pieces are not in place and there will be challenges as IBM continues to sail on its information infrastructure journey. Those issues aside, I believe that everyone, customers and competitors alike, should give due attention to the direction that the company is taking. From what I saw at the Analyst Summit in Boston, IBM is ready for, and focused on, pursuing current and future Information Infrastructure opportunities.  

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