Archive for the ‘pulse’ Category
Live @ IBM Pulse 2013: A Q&A With IBM Tivoli GM Deepak Advani
Turbo sat down for a chat with IBM Tivoli general manager Deepak Advani earlier this week, discussing a range of topics relevant to to the broader smarter infrastructure management discussion taking place at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas this week.
This week at IBM Pulse 2013, I had the opportunity to sit down with IBM Tivoli general manager, Deepak Advani.
Deepak has served in a variety of executive capacities at IBM during the course of his career, including most recently as the Vice President of IBM’s Business Analytics organization. He was also instrumental in the development and growth of IBM’s Linux portfolio, and later served e1as the Chief Marketing Officer for Lenovo.
Our chat ranged across a variety of topics relevant to the conference and the broad opportunity presented by more effective infrastructure and asset management and utilization. Deepak recapped some of the key themes he presented to the audience of 8,000+ attendees, spoke of the challenges the world’s largest organizations face with respect to their IT operations, and explained how more effective visibility, control and automation of their systems can help turn opportunities into business outcomes.
Live From IBM Pulse 2013: Dr. Danny Sabbah — The Internet Is The Computer
Dr. Danny Sabbah, CTO and general manager for IBM Next Generation Architecture, extols on the promise and virtues of the nexus between “systems of engagement” and “systems of record” at the opening general session of IBM Pulse 2013 in Las Vegas, Nevada, earlier today.
Welcome to the world of the hybrid cloud and legacy application environment, a merger of the front office and the back, the nexus of the burgeoning mobile and social milieu (the “systems of engagement”) with the systems of record.
This was the key message delivered in the opening general session of IBM Pulse 2013 here at the almost packed MGM Grand Garden arena here in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The opening itself was another kind of hybrid, one that featured a number of skilled percussionists drumming in the key messages of the challenges and opportunities facing IT organizations around the globe.
Speed is a constant. Change is a constant. Declining budgets are a constant. What’s the variable?
The opportunity to create new kinds of value for the organization by better fusing business assets, facilities, infrastructure, and data into a seamless and holistic view of the entire operation, one whereby you help your organization better gain increased visibility, control, and automation.
In short, to move from being a cost center to a center of strategic business innovation, and to turn opportunities into outcomes.
Are you prepared to take on this new challenge?
IBM Tivoli marketing guru Scott Hebner entered the stage to set the stage for IBM Pulse 2013, explaining there were 8,000+ attendees from over 80 countries around the globe, and that the depth and breadth and diversity of experience in this room (and we’re talking about a pretty big room…like, as in, Carrie Underwood will be playing this room for Pulse this evening) was unprecedented.
Scott started his opening by asking a few key questions of the gathered infrastructure management faithful: Where does an infrastructure begin and where does it end? How do we make it become more interconnected and instrumented so we can garner more value from existing assets?
Scott explained that we’re all sitting on a staggering amount of operational data, both animate and inanimate — and not just in the traditional data center, either. In your tractors. Your warehouses. Your office buildings.
And this “operational big data” residing in all those assets is an enormous opportunity, one that allows us to better understand the “exact condition of everything in real-time.” Which means also extracting new value from those assets and, hence, being able to then provide better services to our organizations and users.
But the climbing of this new mountain of data has its challenges. For one, skills. IDC expects 7 million new cloud computing positions to come online, 6X that over the rest of IT employment. That means new skills, new training, new…students.
Which is one of the primary reasons we’re all gathered here in Lost Wages, to come together and learn from the experts and one another, to improve the economics of IT, and to uncover those growth opportunities.
Scott introduced a customer who flew all the way here from down under, in Melbourne, Australia, to share their experience in this new frontier of computing.
Neal Roberts, the CIO of Yarra Trams, is part of a team that oversees the largest tram network in the world, one with 250 kilometers of track and nearly 500 tram cars that travel some 185 million track miles per year!
First, Yarra’s values, which help drive both the team and the trams: Think like a passenger, do Zero harm, and provide Continuous Improvement.
The first two are pretty self-evident, but the third, continuous improvement, takes some concerted and coordinated effort and a lot of hard work.
That coordination increasingly takes place between the line of business and IT organizations. And Mr. Roberts explained that “We’re all facing the same challenges. Trying to manage the velocity of change, and to become centers of innovation while reinventing the customer relationship.”
For Yarra, that meant driving a symbiosis of asset management and location information, the so-called systems of record, with the real-time notification opportunities of social media data.
It goes a little something like this: The rains come, puts a tram out of service when it gets flooded, the operations center is notified, the operations center schedules a dispatch to fix the train, the schedule is altered, data is streamed to the public cloud (including a mobile app for tram users) to notify them automagically the train schedule has been disrupted/altered, the tram eventually gets fixed, all goes back to normal.
Yarra Tram of Melbourne, Australia, uses IBM Maximo asset management technology to bridge to “systems of engagement” and inform Melbourne citizens when trams are out of service so they can make other arrangement.s
No problem, the trams are back to running on time.
Dr. Danny Sabbah, CTO and general manager of IBM Next Generation Platforms, picked it up from there.
Dr. Sabbah observed that we are truly at an inflection point, and that since last year, the key themes which emerged around securing the cloud, mobile, and embedded solutions, have only become more important, and that we’re now seeing this increased integration of public cloud data and the existing services.
That is again the important nexus to focus on, because it is from that nexus that we’ll see increasing value unlocked by organizations around the globe, and it’s a new stage in the evolution of technology and the importance of data.
Dr. Sabbah included a key example: Mobile devices are anticipated to account for 40% of access to all kinds of business applications in the next few years.
And as a result of this, big data is joining mobile and cloud as the next must have competency.
“Devices are becoming more intelligent and communicating even more data,” Sabbah continued, and we’re getting “smart buildings, smart grids, and smarter healthcare. None of these are operating in isolated silos.”
“The convergence of these technologies,” he explained, “is driving the Internet of things.”
And yet intelligent interconnection and instrumentation is making it increasingly hard to balance efficiency and innovation. Sabbah explained, “The drive for innovation drives a commensurate need for technology optimization” and that optimization is what helps free up finite IT resources for focusing on innovation.
That is also another reason IBM has put so much muscle behind its PureSystems line of technology, with the express intention of freeing up people, time, and money from mundane operational tasks of server administration, data routines, etc., so they can work on value added projects!
The new cloud and mobile-based “systems of engagement” spoken of earlier, along with the systems of record from the past 40 years of computing, aren’t going away, and in fact, the opportunity for these systems to interact and interoperate extracts new value. But that requires flexibility (read: openness) in their infrastructure design, because different workloads are coming together — some require new levels of optimization, others new levels of maintenance, and some towards speed of delivery.
But, ultimately, flexible architectures allow us to mash up new services, so that those organizations who build flexibility into their infrastructure DNA are those “most poised to win.”
Getting there will require rapid iteration and the continued “reduction of confused and conflicting infrastructure and software.”
“It’s not the network that’s the computer,” Sabbah wound down. “It’s the Internet that’s the computer.”
Live From IBM Pulse 2013: Chris Gardner And His Pursuit of Happyness
Author, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Chris Gardner speaks to the gathered Tivoli Business Partner Summit audience in Las Vegas about his trials and tribulations as a single father who, despite finding he and his infant son homeless on the streets of San Francisco, overcame his great adversity and inspired millions around the world, and in the process raised the world’s consciousness about the perils of homelessness and the importance of parenting.
You may not know Chris Gardner by name or by face. But if he told you that one of the world’s most bankable movie stars, one who travels with a four bodyguard security entourage, made a movie about his story, he might just get your attention, as he got mine when he kicked off this afternoon’s session at the Tivoli Business Partner Summit here at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
And that’s when Mr. Gardner explained that Will Smith was not going to be joining us, and also the first moment Chris Gardner had the audience in the palm of his hands, which he never let go for the ensuing 45 minutes.
If you don’t know the story behind the story behind “The Pursuit of Happyness,” then you’re missing out. But the irony wasn’t lost on Mr. Gardner, who joked that the people in “Hollyweird” spent $70 million to recreate a story he endured “for nothing.”
But as it turns out, it wasn’t for nothing, as it’s a story that has inspired people around the world, in the form of both a movie and a book, one which has been translated into six dialects of the Chinese language.
And it all started with an interview that Mr. Gardner almost didn’t do with Barbara Walters for “20/20.”
But he did do the interview, which ran on a Friday, and on Monday the floodgates opened with calls wanting to exploit his story. Juxtapose that with another Friday he found himself in a Bay Area jail, a much longer weekend where he had to wait to get released so he could go and find his infant son.
Because ultimately, Gardner explained, that was his life’s work, a promise to himself: To break the cycle of failed fatherhood among black males, a promise he made when he was only five himself and didn’t have his own father around.
Soon, there was one call from the entertainment realm that interested him, one from Steve Tisch, a co-producer on “Forrest Gump” and part of a firm called “Escape Artists,” who convinced Gardner he wanted to help him share his story with the world through the form of a major motion picture.
Though Gardner was at first hesitant to okay Will Smith as the star — “This story is about inner space, not outer space” Gardner explained — his daughter ultimately convinced him when she said “Papa, don’t worry. If he can play Muhammad Ali he can play you.”
The key question everyone wanted to know, Gardner then continued, was “how do you become homeless?”
And his answer was, “life happens.”
He had worked his way into a great job at a local university, was soon married and an expectant father, and he was all about seizing opportunity. After enduring for a period a cushy if modest lab equipment sales job, he one day saw a guy driving a Ferrari, which he offered to help find a parking spot for. But he first wanted an answer to two questions:
“What do you do, and how do you do that?”
The answer was the guy was a stockbroker, cleared about $80,000 a month, and because Gardner was “pretty good with numbers,” decided that’s what he wanted to do with his life.
But as he again explained, “life happens,” and before he knew it he was destitute due to some accumulated parking tickets and some domestic woes at home. Before he knew it, he was without a job, health care, and soon, even his wife and son.
It was a single policeman who, during his ten day jail stay, cut him some slack and allowed him to make a phone call so he could postpone the all-important stock trader assistant job position he was applying for.
Shortly thereafter, he was successful in getting the job, but he lost his wife and now had an infant son to take care of. The boarding house he was staying in didn’t allow children, so he quickly found himself and his son on the streets of Oakland with no place to go.
It was at this point that Gardner explained that an estimated 23% of homeless people “have jobs and go to work everyday,” and that this problem has only grown through the economic downturn.
But through a series of ingenious, if challenging, moves, he found a way to take care of his son and endure the hard-nosed requirements of the new job, staying at times on the streets, at others in dime hotels, and yes, acceding to the kindness of strangers.
Including a reverend at a local homeless food distributor, Mo’s Kitchen, the proprietor of which saw Gardner standing in line with his infant son, an anomaly considering most of the kitchen’s visitors were homeless women with children.
“What are you doing with that baby?” the reverend asked one day. “I’m gonna keep it,” Gardner explained.
And so every day for a year, that’s precisely what Gardner did. “You would see me, my son, a stroller, one suit on my back and another in a hanging bag, and we hit the street, every day for a year.”
They slept outside, at airports (this was pre 9/11), a Union Station bathroom…wherever they could. And Gardner observed the one thing his son remembers from this period was this: “Every time I looked up, my father was there.”
Gardner remembers, “He didn’t know we were homeless.”
And despite all else, Gardner stayed homeless, until such time that he could save enough money to find his own place, a small apartment not two blocks from the train station they once frequented for shelter.
Gardner went to explain that his son didn’t know that some of the times he ate, Gardner went hungry, or that sometimes he was able to get a hotel room only after first giving blood. He didn’t know that, Gardner explained, “because that’s what fathers do.”
After spending their first night in their new home, Gardner’s son saw him leaving the apartment without carrying everything he owned, which he’d been forced to do for the better part of that year.
Gardner explained to him, “You know what son, we got a key now…we’re home. We don’t have to carry stuff anymore.”
“That was the start of turning our lives around,” Gardner related, although it hadn’t come easy. “After a year of struggle, I didn’t know how much more I could take when one day, my son, stood up in the bathtub, and said, ‘Papa, you know what? You a good papa.’”
We know the rest of the story from the movie, and from Gardner’s retelling. He went on to enjoy great success as a stock broker, ultimately arriving at Bear Sterns’ San Francisco office and making millions.
“Sometimes it’s okay to laugh all the way to the bank,” Gardner joked.
But through it all, Gardner never lost his perspective.
Much later, the great American poet Maya Angelou explained to Gardner that “This story ain’t even about you. This is about every mother who ever also had to be a father, and every father who ever also had to be a mother.”
This was about breaking the cycle of men who have not been there for their children.
And though you might not recognize Chris Gardner walking down the street if you ran right into him, he was there for his son.
And in the end, that’s all he really wanted any of us to know.
Live From IBM Pulse 2013: A Day For Partners
Turbo starts his IBM Pulse 2013 experience with a quick trip down golf, and “Rat Pack”, history by playing a round at the renowned Las Vegas National golf course, one of the courses where Tiger Woods won his first PGA tournament victory in 1996. For the record, Turbo held his own, shooting an 84 (but convinced he could have gone lower if the greens had held).
Good morning, Las Vegas.
You know, I joke about Vegas as my second home, but I really do have to admit, it’s a city that continues to grow on me.
And I’m sure that couldn’t have *anything* to do with the delightful, if dreadfully slow, round of golf I played yesterday at Las Vegas National.
As I mentioned in a post on Friday, this is the very same course (one of three) where Tiger Woods won his first PGA Tour event, the Las Vegas Invitational, back in 1996 (he beat Davis Love III on the first playoff hole to win).
It’s also where Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and others of the infamous “Rat Pack” used to hang out. I was only fifty years late on that front, but nonetheless, I did experience the course in all it’s glory and managed to pull of an 84. Considering Tiger’s 70 in 1996, I figure I was only .77 strokes a hole behind Tiger.
But enough sports analytics, because now all the play is behind me as I get down to work and the matter at hand, IBM Pulse 2013.
Please see my last post for some tips and tricks for navigating this year’s event (oh, did I mention, bring or go buy some comfortable shoes)?
I made my first navigation from the MGM hotel to the Convention Center this morning, and on the way, saw the now annual Burma Shave-like signs reminding us “we’re almost there!”
My favorite: Multitasking is all about doing several things badly all at once (There will be more of those tidbits of wisdom to come in future posts.)
Amen, oh great IBM Tivoli Confucian hallway philosopher!
Of course, this ain’t no Blazing Saddles shindig, so you actually *do* need a stinkin’ badge.
So, I picked mine up and wandered on into the Pulse Business Partner Summit to break a little fast, and chat with some of our partners.
When the lights went down, IBM Tivoli general manager soon hit the stage to “introduce” himself to the gathered wall-to-wall audience.
And it was quite an introduction. I’ve interviewed Deepak a few times now at IBM events, and even I had no idea of his depth of experience at IBM.
He explained he’s once been a UNIX programmer and helped bring TCP/IP to the mainframe, had worked on the SP2 supercomputer that once upon a time outwitted a Soviet chess superpower, and helped implement a number of key high availability and systems management capabilities into IBM’s mainframe line.
More recently, Deepak was the chief marketing officer for Lenovo before returning to the IBM fold to lead our Business Analytics efforts and oversee the acquisition of SPSS.
Deepak warmed the audience to him with a very funny story about having been representing IBM with its new supercomputer at a conference in frigid Rochester. Apparently, the IBM computer was very plain and vanilla looking, and so the competition started making fun of it.
Deepak and his team decided to run out to Wal-Mart and purchase some Christmas lights, which they promptly wrapped around their supercomputer (turned out IBM had the fastest supercomputer, Christmas lights and all).
IBM Tivoli general manager Deepak Advani opens the Tivoli Business Partner Summit by introducing himself to the Tivoli crowd and explaining the depth and breadth of his background, which began as a UNIX systems programmer and shell script author back in the day. Advani now leads the IBM Tivoli organization worldwide, and will be featured prominently throughout IBM Pulse 2013.
After establishing his background and bona fides, Deepak got down to business, reaffirming the critical importance of IBM’s partners to the Tivoli and broader IBM business, but explaining none of us in the ecosystem could rest on our laurels.
“We must bring more industry and domain expertise” into our technologies, Deepak asserted, “and we must also bring our line of business and IT audiences more closely together.”
This, of course, observing a theme pervasive within IBM since CEO Ginni Rometty took the helm: We must focus more on our line of business executives.
From CMO to CFO, they are increasingly involved in the IT decision-making process, and the back office has moved to the front, requiring a more collaborative “sell” for both constituencies.
Deepak also acknowledged the pain IT organizations felt these last several years, and explained that’s why IBM has worked to try and free them from operational matters with technologies like PureSystems, so that they can spend more time working with their LOB partners on innovation.
Finally, Deepak walked the audience through a number of key core and growth priorities, ranking among them the continued focus on mainframe and storage evolution, the importance of standars, and looking forward to growth areas like endpoint management and cloud computing.
He talked specifically about the notion of the “portability of workloads,” explain how IBM has taken patterns from PureSystems and moving them to the cloud. (A line of questioning I aspire to take up in my interview tomorrow on the Livestream stage with PureSystems’ Nancy Pearson and Jason Gartner.)
He also tiptoed through the world of “dev-ops,” with specific regard to managing the life cycles of applications.
Finally, Deepak explained we can do more to improve the design and usability of our portfolio, and also use analytics (his old job!) to improve and make better operational decisions.
Pulse 2013 is underway…hold on to your console!
Me, Frank, Dean, Sammy and Tiger
Turbo was caught unawares at the TechTarget Online ROI Summit in downtown Austin yesterday as colleagues took a photo of him in “mobile warrior” mode. Among his electronic devices identified on the table: A Verizon Mi-Fi hotspot, Turbo’s Verizon LG feature phone, a 5th gen Apple iPod Touch, a “Blu” phone (quadband, works on GSM networks around the world, serves as the Turbo “bat” phone and FM radio), a Plantronics Pro HD bluetooth headset, an HTC Wildfire Android tablet, and Turbo’s newfangled Samsung Chromebook, which is looking like a bargain at the price ($216) compared to the new Google Chromebook Pixel ($1,300!)
All these people in Barcelona attending Mobile World Congress, and seemingly so little news coming out of there.
For me, the key headline was the Nokia 105 which, while yawned at by most westerners, has the potential to be the downmarket phone king as Nokia moves more aggressively into emerging markets.
It’s a $20 phone that offers the basics, including phone calls, SMS, an FM-radio and a flashlight. And, 35 days of standby with 12.5 hours of talk time.
If it were a quad band GSM phone, I’d have it on my short list for second phones.
The other big news was IBM’s MobileFirst strategy, which, while not nearly as sexy as yet another yawnifying tablet device, does provide some grown-up guidance and direction for companies actually trying to pull together something resembling a unified mobile strategy.
Here’s what IBM’s Robert Leblanc, IBM vice president, middleware, had to say about the IBM MobileFirst initiative:
“To date, mobile computing has been dominated by discussions of new smartphones, operating systems, games and apps. But enterprises have yet to tap into the potential of mobile business. Just as the Internet transformed the way we bank, book vacations and manage our healthcare, mobile computing is also transforming industries. As these devices become ingrained in everything that we do, businesses are now in the palms of their customers’ hands. IBM MobileFirst is designed to make the transformation to becoming a mobile enterprise a reality.”
Visit here to learn more about IBM’s MobileFirst initiative, and go here to watch the IBM Mobile webcast that took place in Barcelona yesterday.
As for me, I’m packing up my mobile devices and taking them on the road.
In fact, I packed them up and took them to the TechTarget Online ROI Summit here in downtown Austin yesterday, and my colleagues thought it was worthy of a Facebook photo.
To which I explained, “I was traveling light!” (See the photo caption for an explanation of what’s what.)
Where am I off to, you ask? To Vegas, of course. My second home! IBM Pulse 2013 kicks off on Sunday, and I’m heading out early manana to take in a little golf history lesson.
That is to say, I have a 2:30 tee time at Las Vegas National, the very same course where Tiger Woods won his first PGA Tour event back in 1996, and where Dean and Frank and Sammy and the rest of the Rat Pack used to hang out and swill martinis after a long hard-fought 18 holes.
I’d like to tell you I’m playing there because of all this history and Tiger lore, but the fact is the old Scotsman from GolfNow gave me a very aggressively priced tee time, which no other courses were offering!
After that, however, it’s all work, and I’m looking forward to interviewing a number of IBM Tivoli luminaries for the IBM Pulse Livestream channel, including some of our business partners, analysts, and the man himself, Deepak Advani, the general manager of IBM Tivoli.
I want to also remind you of Pulse on Vivastream, where you can go do some preliminary social networking. Also check out the killer feature there in the right hand column of the main page, the “DIY Videos” where you can get some early previews of Pulse session speakers. Kil-ler.
In fact, let me do this: Below is my list of “Everything You Ever Needed To Know About IBM Pulse 2013 But Were Afraid to Ask Turbo”:
- Hashtag: #ibmpulse — all roads lead back to Twitter. Twitter is all-seeing and all-knowing at Pulse 2013.
- Vivastream at Pulse — How you can maintain your crazy Pulse schedule, find your long, lost systems admin buddy…orrr, that really cute girl whose lip you accidentally bused in that crazy, countrified Carrie Underwood mosh pit.
- IBM Pulse 2013 Conference Site — If you’re lost at IBM Pulse…or even if you’re not…this is always a good place to start. You can also use this page to find the video interviews I’ll start conducting on Monday.
- IBM Pulse Smart Site (Registered attendees only) — The official keeper of your IBM Pulse calendar.
- IBM Pulse On Facebook — Because we recognize there are people like me who spend way too much time on Facebook, and if you want to get their attention…
And now I want to pass you on to my good friend Rebecca’s Top Things You Shouldn’t Miss at Pulse 2013 — it does not include a round with Turbo at Las Vegas National, but other than that, it’s a great list.
Meanwhile, keep an eye for me on Saturday. I’ll be the one driving down the Las Vegas Strip looking for errant drives.
Taking The Pulse On Mobile
IBM Pulse 2013 is introducing a new social networking feature called “Pulse on Vivastream,” where you can connect and interact with other attendees and speakers to find people with similar interests and skills, share agendas, discuss hot and trending topics, and network with your peers. So, sign up now so you can make the most of IBM Pulse 2013 — before, during, and after the event.
First it was Ubuntu Linux on phones, and now it looks like it’s going to be Ubuntu Linux on Tablets.
TechCrunch posts that on Thursday, developers will be able to start “playing with” the new code, citing Ubuntu founder and VP Products Mark Shuttleworth saying that the strategy is “One Ubuntu” that contains the same codebase but works across multiple platforms, including desktops, phones, and tablets.
But, that each platform “uses a Linux kernel” that’s tailored for the specifics of the target hardware.
This in juxtaposition with iOS and Android, which don’t work as well beyond the handset form factor.
For the record, I currently run Ubuntu on several of my older machines, and save for some VPN woes, I’m a (mostly) happy Ubuntu user.
But what’s more interesting to me about this announcement is the timing. The global mobile confab, Mobile World Congress, is set to launch next week in Barcelona (one of my favorite cities on the planet!).
And speaking of mobile, just last week, IBM announced that Forrester Research, Inc. has recognized IBM as a leader in enterprise mobility services in its recent Forrester Wave report “Enterprise Mobility Services, Q1 2013.”
The report gave IBM the highest score possible on its current offering, writing that IBM “brings clients a world-class design agency (IBM Interactive) combined with breadth and depth of enterprise mobility consulting in terms of technology and global presence.”
I expect you’ll hear more about IBM’s mobile strategy in Barcelona, and shortly thereafter at the IBM Pulse event in Las Vegas, which I’ll be covering for Big Blue.
If you’re planning on attending IBM Pulse, I would highly recommend you start preparing your schedule now. Already-registered attendees simply need go to the Pulse SmartSite to start checking out this year’s fare.
But wait, there’s more!
This year, IBM has introduced an exciting new social feature in the form of Pulse on Vivastream, a unique social networking platform where you can connect and interact with other attendees and speakers in advance of, during, and after the event to find people with similar interests and skills, share agendas, discuss hot and trending topics, and network with other attendees before you ever land in the land of what happens there stays there.
I’m already registered on “Pulse on Vivastream” myself, so feel free to drop by and introduce yourself.
This year, IBM Pulse guest speakers and performers include 4-time NFL MVP quarterback Peyton Manning and 6-time Grammy Award winner Carrie Underwood.
You’ll also have the opportunity to mix it up with 8,000+ of your peers and hear from IBM business partners and top industry analysts on the latest trends and hottest IT topics…including, yes, mobile.
You can go here to learn more about IBM Pulse 2013, which goes from March 3-6.
I’ll be bringing you more insights and coverage leading up to and during the event right here in the Turbo blog, and will once again be broadcasting via the Interwebs from the show floor, speaking with a variety of IBM executives, industry analysts, and other thought leaders that help make the IBM Tivoli world go round.
Live @ Pulse 2012: Steve Mills Keynote: Running Linux Like A Scalded Dog
Welcome to the Day Two Pulse Keynote summary, whereby I try to consolidate a gazillion thoughts, stories, and case studies into a coherent narrative.
First, know we had to turn off all our digital gadgets so that “iLuminate” could come onstage and dance with their lighted costumes. Their performance was amazing, but I don’t have any pictures to share so you’ll just have to trust me or go watch them on YouTube here:
Tivoli veep Scott Hebner came back onstage after the dancing was over to explain that today we were going to share our client’s success stories and that “we must achievee sharper insight into a seemingly endless infrastructure.”
Today was moving day, as it were, where we start to learn all about implementation and roadmaps to success, Hebner promised.
Really? I thought it was the day of the night that Maroon 5 took the stage!
Hebner went on to assure the Pulse audience that “we spend as much time as we can how to support our customers, as we do actually building the technologies.”
He then explained the critical importance, capabilities, and skills of our business partners through a pretty standard but relevant BP interview video, before going on to congratulate all the IBM Tivoli Business Partner award winners for 2012.
Before Hebner turned the stage over, he mentioned one last key point, that IBM has long been committed to open standards, a commitment that continues with cloud computing and IBM’s co-founding of the “Cloud Standards Customer Council (see www.cloud-council.org), which already has over 300 active members in the form of companies like Boeing, Kroger, and others.
Customer-driven cloud standards, not vendor driven.
Hebner then introduced IBM senior VP and group executive, software and systems, Steve Mills, who “has three decades of helping our clients solve their business problems.”
IBM Software senior VP and group exec, Steve Mills, throws down the gauntlet at Pulse 2012, explaining that "Linux runs like a scalded dog" on System z and that more IT organizations need to make more decisions based on economic realities.
Mill’s keynote today was impassioned, as much didactic lecture as informative overview. Mills explained he was going to give a perspective on information technology that “centered on economics,” clearly perturbed at the continuing politics in many IT organizations that lead to bad decisions driven by turf rather than data.
To prove his point, Mills used the IBM story as one that he could relate “the art of the possible,” one of consolidation and efficiency that focused on best outcomes and achievements, not internal politics.
He put up a slide (see sidebar below) that explained how smarter planet solutions are increasing the demands placed on IT. For example, data centers have doubled their energy use in the past five years, and there’s an 18% increase in data center energy costs projected. The costs of the IT assets themselves, Mills pointed out, are only a small and marginal component of IT’s overall costs. Labor, energy, and other costs are a much more substantial component of the costs, so IT has to work much smarter, and in a much more automated fashion, to keep the costs reasonable.
Smarter planet solutions have increased demands on IT, with 50% year-over-year growth in the digital universe and internet-connected devices growing 42% year-over-year.
Sprawl drives costs, Mills explained. “We know this from IBM, talking to thousands of businesses around the world.”
But, he went on, “we eat our own cooking,” and that IBM consolidation efforts to date had saved over $100M and counting, and that the TCO comparison for distributed workloads versus those on z Systems is a substantial savings on virtualized Linux via z.
“Linux runs like a scalded dog on the mainframe,” Mills asserted, the quote of Pulse 2012 thus far. Mills elaborated on IBM’s investments in System z: “If the work can be consolidated onto Z, we do it. System z plays a critical role in IBM’s journey. Migrations to System z have delivered almost 60% of the project’s total cumulative savings to date.”
But too many organizations don’t look at putting the right workloads in the right places and systems.
With much of IBM’s own IT workload consolidation, “We can give better service faster in IBM relative to the applications they run” Mills detailed. For example, IBM reduced server provisioning from 5 days to 1 hour. Configuration, operations, management, and monitoring labor was reduced by 50%.
In the collaboration realm, IBM now has more than 300M meeting minutes in the cloud per day and supports >85% of IBM’s overall web conferencing needs (which are, trust me, extensive. We IBMers mostly don’t live in offices anymore — we live in emeetings from our home and mobile offices!)
His message was clear: Focus your IT investments based on the reality of your business, not territory or political alignments.
As always, Steve concluded with some key customer examples. Nationwide Insurance saved $15M cost savings over three years using Linux on Systems z. Now, they have 85-90% server utilization and an 80% reduction in environmental costs.
Technische Unviersitat Munchen replaced 150+ servers with two IBM Power servers, saving 85%, and energy consumption reduced by 80%.
Carter’s Inc., a leading children’s apparel company in the U.S., now accelerates data backup by 83% and achieves a 23:1 data compression ratio when it virtualizes its data storage environment. This has reduced data backup time from 12 hours to 2 hours.
Then, Steve Mills did something he doesn’t often, and that was to open the kimono.
In fact, yesterday during our interview with Steve, I asked him what, if anything, had changed since he had taken helm of the IBM Systems group (along with his existing Software responsibilities).
His response was revealing: Nothing had changed. Work integrating our systems and software for optimizing workload would continue as it had, if not accelerate.
The following slide reveals some of the details. Based on these comments, I would expect more news on this front very soon. : )
I wouldn't want to read *too* much into this, but it looks like to me, IBM's coming out with some new and integrated systems, and soon. Just so long as they continue to run that "scalded dog Linux!"
IBM Pulse 2012: Day 1 Keynote Session: Business Without Limits
This morning’s keynote session at Pulse 2012 keyed in on several key themes critical to managing the world’s infrastructure. Opening musical act, Naturally Seven, lent their own seven cents, explaining through song and human-voice driven instruments that “I Built This Wall Around Me, I Built this Wall From The Ground, See.”
IBM Senior Vice President Robert Leblanc explains to the gathered IBM Pulse 2012 audience how visibility, control and automation are instrumental for companies looking to keep up with the changing IT and business landscape.
There’s a whole lot of building from the ground up that’s been going on with respect to some of the key areas the Tivoli portfolio focuses on. And IBM Tivoli customer Wellpoint joined the stage to discuss some of those changes in the healthcare industry.
George Zaruba, VP for Tech Strategy there, explained that Wellpoint is one of the U.S.’ largest healthcare benefits companies, with some 37,700 associates. Major industry shifts are requiring Wellpoint to reinvent itself and in its relationship with the end customer, and to be able to deliver services in ways its customers are used to and comfortable with. “Our delivery model needs to be secure and stable and reach users across a myriad of devices and platforms,” he explained.
Which means infrastructure needs to be everywhere, and which will allow Wellpoint to manage the effectiveness of their customers’ experience.
That’s why infrastructure needs to be everywhere, to have full visibility into core services. Zaruba explained “We’ve achieved this over the past several years with ITIL management and best practices, and virtualization of storage and services.”
That also led Wellpoint to its partnership with IBM Watson, which Wellpoint is currently working on as the first industry deployment of that important technology to “find the best answers to some very tough medical questions.”
Next up, IBM VP Scott Hebner joined the stage and explained there are “8,000 of you from 79 different countries.”
That’s some Pulse!
Hebner explained IBM is “obsessed about learning from our clients, and this conference is a reflection of our obsession, which focuses on real-world experiences and bottom line results.”
Hebner explained the opportunities are vast and unprecedented, and yet “the opportunity highway has ditches on both sides of the road.” The implication being, try and stay out of the ditch!
Hebner shared some factoids: 80% of CEOs surveyed by IBM anticipate turbulent changes and bold moves, and 64% of CIOs work as senior business execs in their orgs to drive innovation.
And yet, still, there’s a 3X gap increase between the desired needs and the actual outcomes.
Red meat to this gathering of IT gurus, Hebner also explained jobs related to technology are forecasted to be the fastest growing segment through 2018, with cloud jobs increasing 60%, and mobility, 50%.
But, the planet on which we operate is rapidly changing thanks to the proliferation of lower-cost technologies. People, systems, and objects can interact with one another in entirely new ways, and that creates new opportunities and expectations.
Infrastructure is now everywhere, he explained, across every industry. Where does my business infrastructure begin and end these days? How do I turn this new reality into an advantage.
Business without limits, is what Hebner explained this as. The smarter approach turns data into insights in real time, at the point of interaction — it must, as we can now instrument everything, from the devices in the home to the processes themselves, giving us millions of data points.
To help explain this opportunity, IBM senior VP Robert Leblanc joined the stage and suggested there’s no escaping all this change, and that technology was a key enabler, according the IBM CEO study stretching back to 2004. Beyond “market forces,” technology is considered a requirement by CEOs to enable their businesses to adapt to all this change.=
“How do you drive the speed that the business needs to adapt to its markets?” Leblanc inquired. The answer, simple to say, harder to do: Focus on fundamental business imperatives: 1) Build 2) Reinvent, 3) Uncover.
That is, create operating dexterity while creating new customer relationships and uncovering new profit streams.
Most clients want to reinvent around their customer relationships, Leblanc explained, and if you look back 25 years ago, those that lead the industries are different from the leaders today. The CEO is making it clear: I need change, and IT has to change with it.
Analytics continues to be the driving requirement in the industry technology shift, followed by mobility and virtualization -- all key themes here at Pulse 2012.
Leblanc then shared some data as to what is driving an unprecedented shift in technology: Analytics, 83%. Followed by Mobility, 75%. And virtualization, 68%.
Insight. Everywhere. No matter where.
Implicit to all this, underlying concerns about security, and a focus on achieving all these desired business outcomes through “visibility,” “control,” and “automation.”
To have full visibility of the span of your infrastructure, you must have and assert control, and in order to be able to focus on new value added initiatives, you must automate the more mundane but critical capabilities.
Some examples, Leblanc explained: China Great Wall improved server utilization by 30%. BlueCrossBlueShield of North Carolina saved 5,000 hours of staff time by automating security processes. SunTrust improved productivity by automating 50% of manual processes.
Finally, it was Tivoli General Manager Danny Sabbah’s time to speak, and Danny explained how all of these changes and trends are re-orienting Tivoli customers’ outlooks and the things they specifically need to be focused on.
He explained that “our world is changing drastically whether we like it or not,” and that “simply put, we’re being forced to rethink the way we run our businesses.”
We find ourselves at the vortex of three dominant transformations taking place in IT: Mobility, Smarter phsyical infrastructures, and security.
Mobility, he explained, is nearly ubiquitous, and now accounts for 40% of the total number of devices accessing business applications.
We’re seeing embedded intelligence and resultant smarter physical infrastructures where previously passive devices are now equipped with sensors and RFID tags and other tracking capabilities. Companies are now building applications to exploit the data gathered from these smart devices to better understand and run their operations.
And thirdly, security threats have become an integral part of this much larger montage. The more embedded intelligence, the more mobility, the more ways we execute commerce, social collaboration, and so on. So, security must become part of everything we do.
This intersection, then, has spawned an even greater degree of complexity across business infrastructures, and the environment we find ourselves in has become more interconnected, moresusceptible to threats and even more difficult to manage.
Utilizing the power of cloud computing, IBM is tackling these issues head on with its customers. But if you want hype and marketing, Sabbah concluded, you’ll have to go somewhere else because “this conference is about solving real problems in the real world.”
The IBM Pulse 2012 Circus Begins
Greetings from Viva Las Vegas, Nevada.
I arrived here under the cover of darkness yesterday.
Actually, I arrived in the afternoon, but “cover of darkness” sounds so much more dramatic.
It’s been a crazy week on the road, but we’re only halfway through. Now, Pulse 2012 starts.
Pulse is one of my favorite IBM Software events. It was Tivoli that brought me back to my native Texas, and to Austin in particular, in the summer of 2001.
I made a lot of great friends during my time working with the Tivoli brand, and I also got a lot of great work done.
And Tivoli has evolved over the past eleven years. Dramatically.
I need not tell any Tivolian, customer or employee, that.
For my money, it’s evolved all for the better. The focus of the Tivoli business has far expanded well beyond its core systems management focus, which is what it was centered around when I arrived.
Here’s a factoid: I’ve never seen a Cirques du Soleil performance. Until last night, when I took in the “Ka” show here at the MGM Grand.
That might seem like a random transition. But follow me here. A Cirques du Soleil performance is like one big ecosystem that must be managed across its disparate parts.
A former theatre major myself, I watched in fascination at all the systems that were in play during the Cirques’ performance of “Ka.” The massive staging and hydraulic systems. The flying systems that allowed the performers to defy gravity. The house staff that welcomed the audience into the show. The audience itself. The cast. The scores of stagehands in the background.
If you’ve seen a Cirques du Soleil performance, you know of which I speak: It’s a massive and complex linkage of disparate systems coming together to create the wonder that are their shows.
These days, your world is a lot like all those systems. And to be able to understand and manage it all, and extract new value out of the knowledge you have about all those systems…well, that’s where Tivoli comes in.
I’m going to leave it at that, lest you think I’m completely off my rocker. But, I’ve done my homework preparing for Pulse 2012, and between the focus on managing mobile, physical assets and infrastructure, the cloud, and the underlying security, there’s plenty of opportunity for systems linkage and improved understanding of those systems.
So, welcome to Las Vegas for Pulse 2012.
Speaking of systems, be sure and check your bathroom for Bengali tigers. I think it’s just always better to be safe than sorry.
In the meantime, keep an eye here on the Turbo blog and on the Twitter hashtag #ibmpulse. There’s going to be a firehose of information coming at you these next few days!
turbotodd
Turbotodd 