Once a year IBM invites to its global analyst meeting in Stamford to brief on the latest of their software products. The event is very valuable to the analysts as the IBM software group is so wide spread, includes so many products – that’s it tough to get all the messages and products aligned throughout the year.
With IBM not having a cross product user conference (like Microsoft but unlike e.g. Oracle and SAP), which typically form a natural synch point - the meeting is even more important.
The conference was well attended – I estimate over 200 analysts were in the audience – and IBM did a very good job mixing general sessions, round table and mini tent presentations with one to ones and social interactions. I’d say the bar is set high for similar events of other vendors.
Let me exclude the SoftLayer aspect from this post – it’s so fundamental it warrants a post by itself that I will blog hopefully soon. But that little ahead: In my view SoftLayer is IBM’s chance to transform itself into a very different player in the enterprise software market.
IBM is serious about developers and therefore open standards
I had a chance to attend two sessions lead by Danny Sabbah – focusing on the overall developer value proposition of IBM. It looks like the days were IBM could rely on the executive mandate to use the Rational Suite as development tool - are really gone for good. IBM realizes – and that was underlined at times with some remarkable passion – that it does and will keep supporting standards, contribute to open source and make sure that developer tools work in a wider sense - not just with the IBM technology stack – but with all relevant stacks out there.
The investment and commitment to Cloud Foundry has to be seen in that light. And possibly it taught IBM execs a lesson, as the story was, that the Cloud Foundry direction was more or less taken by the in house developers. It then passed the strategic test in the sense that Cloud Foundry is committed to open source and standards – so the step to make all the official moves that IBM has done with Pivotal / Cloud Foundry became a small and easy – but an important one.
The investment and commitment to OpenStack has to be seen from the same perspective. And IBM is actively contributing to OpenStack with close to 400 developers and almost 1600 commits and over 70 blueprints.
Ultimately these moves are to result in a reduction of lock-in and an increase of portability of software constructs – something we hear a lot these days – but it looks like IBM is gaining a lot of credibility in these regards.
The PaaS future is … BlueMix
But to make developers productive, you need development environments and infrastructure that these days comes along as PaaS platform. IBM has been seriously working in this area - the new offering is code named (or is it the product name?) BlueMix and is in alpha. Beta is coming soon – very much look forward to see it and learn more.
And the SaaS Future is … APIs
It was very interesting to see, that IBM is actively looking into exposing the APIs of its more than 100 SaaS applications to developers. This would make the IBM platform the richest API economy out there. Many questions in regards of consumability, granularity, licensing etc need to be addressed – but the vision and direction is compelling. It also rides on a healthy dose of attractiveness as it cannot be easily copied by competitors – except maybe by Oracle…
Watson is … alive and well
I was positively surprised how realistically IBM sees the status of Watson. Maybe some executives even regret the hype once created around the jeopardy show. But today IBM is very realistic that the advisor products are in an early phase – while capable enough to move the needle for certain businesses already. With a vertical focus on financial services, healthcare and travel there is a good (and needed) focus on specific industry problems.
And lastly the decision to create an ecosystem for partners is the right move to not limit the very good Watson DNA to IBM's ideas only – but open it up for the ideas of a large partner community. It was good to see how structured IBM is dealing with partners in that ecosystem and impressive that IBM choose a self service based partner engagement system. Not sure if driven by lack of FTE budget and / or the expectation of an overwhelming partner interest – it’s always good to be able to scale with software.
HCM + Social + Analytics = a high potential formula
With IBM combining the Kenexa offering with its social capabilities, it has created a unique setup to differentiate the Kenexa offerings in the HCM market. Paired with the analyical DNA of Kenexa and the overall ambitious analytics agenda at IBM, I hope for more attractive and differentiating analytical offers to come.
With social capabilities getting baked in the overall platform, IBM has a similar platform play advantage like Oracle. And it was good to see that the involved executives around Alistair Rennie realize that opportunity. We will see in 2014 how well that can be leveraged.
With an alternate view it will be also important for IBM to decide, if it wants to stay only in the talent management race (see the race definition in our post from HRTech here) – or if it wants to join the big race with some core HR and payroll capabilities. That would most likely require some acquisition though.
And IBM is serious... about design
As we learnt a few weeks ago, IBM opened its new innovation center in Austin, with a focus on design. Headed by Phil Gilbert, IBM is aggressively hiring and relocating talent to the Austin facility. Gilbert managed to get the assembled analyst draw to vases - and then apply design thinking on how flowers can change living in a home. Great showcase. With many enterprise software vendors emphasizing design thinking (SAP re-emphasizing it with its Fiori designs, Infor with its agency etc) - IBM maybe even late to the party. But certainly IBM products will benefit from the approach and we look forward to see the first results soon.
What I missed
Despite the 1.5 days and a packed agenda, I did not have enough time to look more in detail on the IBM BigData and mobile plans and capabilities - checkout my colleagues posts, who attended these sessions. Or search for #SWGAI and you will find a few thousand tweets....
MyPOV
A very informative event that gave a good glimpse inside the vast IBM software product landscape. The good news is, that it is more or less coming all together in the cloud and IBM has some smart (pun intended) differentiators it can play to position future products very well in the market. There certainly is a lot of work ahead – and IBM needs to be careful to not disrupt this process by too many acquisitions… but that has not concerned Steve Mills and team too much in the past – so we expect the same for 2014 – and some very exciting products are in the oven.
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Kudos to IBM for creating and updating their own Storify - you can find it here.
And my Dozen - serious and some not so serious takeaways on Storify here.
And my Dozen - serious and some not so serious takeaways on Storify here.