Posts Tagged ‘pulse’
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.
A New Pulse
We’re getting down to the wire on these London 2012 Summer Olympic games.
First off, bonne chance to the U.S. Women’s soccer team, who will have another go at the Japan women’s team, a powerful side that beat the U.S. last summer in the Women’s World Cup finals in penalty kicks.
Kick-off should start around 1:45 CST, and can be found on NBCOlympics.com.
I also wanted to send a shoutout to the ThinkPad, which is celebrating its 20th birthday.
Though IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo a few years back, it was 1992 when IBM introduced its first IBM ThinkPad laptop — I remember it well, because I was an early and proud owner of one of those first machines.
To celebrate the ThinkPad’s birthday, Lenovo is introducing some new machines, including a tablet aimed at business professionals and which runs Windows 8, the Thinkpad Tablet 2.
This new machine will have a 10.1-inch screen and is a mere 9.8mm, and it includes a new Intel Atom processor.
Because it will run Windows 8 Pro, it will be able to run those legacy Window apps you can’t afford to be putting in your desktop recycling bin!
And for you news junkies out there who use Pulse on your iOS or Android devices, there’s some new news on that front: Pulse is now available on the web.
Click to enlarge. The new web-based edition of the Pulse news reader makes it easy to quickly check in on the latest stories broken down by your favorite topics.
The Web version will include most of the features you see on your mobile device, although the list of news sources will now be on your left, with the stories appearing in an elegant grid layout.
Nice way to catch up all the news you can (and cannot) use with a quick glimpse.
I added the “sports” category to my web edition, among others, so let’s hope there’s a nice big picture about the U.S. Women’s soccer team victory over Japan a little later in the day!
You can find your new Pulse here.
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!"
Finding Your Way Through The IBM Cloud
Greetings from the Austin Hilton. It’s the last and final day of SXSW Interactive 2010.
My digits are numbed, my pixels depixellated, my neutrons no longer firing…all of which is a good thing considering that I have to speak this afternoon here at the Hilton.
Folks keep asking me where I’ll be speaking about “Smarter Social Media,” and the answer is Hilton Salon D, 4th Floor. The session’s an extended one, from 3:30 CST until around 6:00.
I’ll likely go on somewhere near the 5 o’clock hour, but it’s one of those sessions that it’s difficult to know exactly. Look for our panel chair, Adam Lavelle (Chief Strategy Officer of search firm iCrossing), and follow the bouncing ball.
Of course, I’m never too busy to mention some great news emerging from behind the Big Blue firewall.
Today, IBM announced plans to go online with its commercial cloud service for software development and testing.
IBM, which already delivers a test and development cloud, is now allowing enterprise and government clients to test and develop on an IBM Cloud.
Following a successful beta program, IBM is working with partners in cloud management, cloud security and software development and testing support to provide businesses with a unique mix of flexibility, scalability, enterprise-grade security and control for development and test on the IBM Cloud.
Here’s a sound byte: The average enterprise devotes up to 50 percent of its entire technology infrastructure to development and test…and yet typically up to 90 percent of it remains idle.
IBM has seen that taking advantage of cloud computing within development and testing environments can help reduce IT labor costs by 50 percent, improve quality and drastically reduce time to market.
IBM’s enterprise-friendly approach to cloud complements clients’ current data centers and traditional development efforts, helping clients:
- Reduce provision cycle times from weeks to minutes
- Eliminate software defects by up to 30 percent.
- Reduce time required for test and quality assurance
- Enable rapid redeployment of environments across multiple IT projects
PayPal, the e-payment service, is extending its global payments platform, PayPal X into the cloud.
PayPal is working with the IBM Cloud Labs to allow its ecosystem of developers to not only innovate on the IBM cloud, but to quickly monetize new applications developed and made available via smart phones.
“We want to provide a very simple way to make payments available on all platforms including mobile applications,” said Osama Bedier, PayPal’s vice president of platform and emerging technologies. “The IBM cloud provides a platform for developers to come together as a community, to create, develop and test new applications. We look forward to seeing the payments innovations our developers create through the IBM cloud and bringing the wallet into the cloud.”
Having heard the interest being expressed in cloud testing by customers at the recent IBM Pulse 2010 conference, this is exciting news and also great to hear the likes of PayPay taking advantage of this new capability.
You can learn more about this and our new cloud partnership services here.
Live @ Pulse 2010: Second Day Buzz
Greetings from 5:47 A.M. Las Vegas time, live in my room at the MGM Signature.
Yesterday was a great start to Pulse 2010, I must say. There was quite a buzz in the air, and even though I was stuck in the MGM “biosphere” for the entirety of the day, I found the content of the opening session and Al Gore’s keynote to be quite compelling.
And the demo of The Venetian and its “smart” city-within-a-city was particularly compelling, and judging from the Twitter comments I saw, you all in the audience really enjoyed it as well. If you wish to show the demo to your colleagues back at the office, you can view it here on YouTube.
As part of yesterday’s festivities, IBM made some key announcements, including around the notion of building smarter buildings.
As I already posted, IBM has partnered with Johnson Controls to optimize energy usage and improve security for clients in more than 150 countries. This new smart building solution will help clients improve asset performance, sustainability, productivity, and safety across buildings and portfolios of buildings.
“Smarter buildings are key to the economic and environmental sustainability of urban environments,” said Rich Lechner, vice president, Energy and Environment for IBM, about the announcement. “Real-time infrastructure data coupled with analytics can enable better economic decisions and environmental outcomes. Together with an array of partners, we are delivering this value to clients today.”
IBM also announced it is working with Ricoh on an advanced device and printing management system which infuses office devices with real-time tracking and monitoring to help firms significantly reduce their print-related costs, improve service and also cut back on carbon emissions.
Gartner has estimated organizations can save between 10 and 30 percent of their printing costs if they better manage their printer, copier, and fax fleets.
You can keep up with all the Pulse-related announcements on this page here.
As for getting Tuesday off to a similarly roaring start, don’t forget this morning’s keynote session will be co-hosted by IBM Chief Privacy Officer and VP, Security Counsel, Harriet Pearson, and IBM System and Technology Group GM Helene Armitage.
Harriet and Helene will explore how integrated service management can meet the needs of a smarter planet, with a particular eye on the practical concerns of managing growth, reducing costs and ensuring security.
See you at the MGM Grand Arena!
turbotodd
Turbotodd 