I had the opportunity to attend the yearly STG (System & Technology Group) analyst meeting in Greenwich earlier this week. STG is the 4th division in Steve Mills responsibility area of IBM – which by itself is larger than many of the large players in the information technology industry (the other 3 are Cloud and Solutions, Database Solutions and of course Watson).
The event was well attended with over 80 analysts and IBM did their usual great job of the mix of general sessions, group sessions, and 1 to 1s.
Here are my three top takeaways from the event:
The event was well attended with over 80 analysts and IBM did their usual great job of the mix of general sessions, group sessions, and 1 to 1s.
Here are my three top takeaways from the event:
- The mainframe is alive and kicking. Often pronounced dead the first computing architecture is doing well, better than I personally thought – even though the mainframe in 2014 is no longer what the Zuses or ENIACs used to be. Substantial load runs on today’s mainframes, 92 of the top 100 banks, 22 of the top 25 US retailers, 10 of the 10 largest insurances on the planet and 23 of the 25 largest airlines are substantial enterprise load. Indeed it was mentioned it is unlikely that the average USA inhabitant touches a mainframe powered product in form of an application or other artifact (e.g. letter, invoice etc.) more than 3 times per day.
Interesting was also that mobile applications are a substantial driver for mainframe growth - the use cases being the above mentioned industries. There is compelling reasons to power your next generation applications via the mainframe – because data and processes are there.
Even more interesting, IBM shared an internal TCO study, bench marking the cost of virtualizing server load on the mainframe – and it was significantly cheaper than on a well know public cloud. Certainly we want to learn more about that study – hopefully soon.
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| How Mobile Demand creates Mainframe Load |
- We were treated by an insight of how IBM’s research arm, that supports the enterprise's products, delivered by Head of R&D John Kelly. And while IBM has a great track record of basic research, much of today’s world's products run on the base of IBM inventions, it was interesting to see how Kelly showed examples how basic research fuels and innovates IBM business. From the Watson group, Project Lucy, BlueMix, the New York Genome Center, R&D is always involved and contributes to these key initiatives.
This is great to see – but I would love to have a conversation with Kelly how IBM makes sure more of it basic research really comes through in monetized products – a challenge for all innovation and R&D centers.
To pick one area of the five top R&R directions, labelled ‘Silicone to Extreme’ – it was fascinating to listen to imminent advancements of 3D chip stacking and silicon nano photonics.
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| Silicon to the Extreme Slide |
- Hybrid Cloud and Software defined Loads – The hybrid cloud theme could not be missing, and STG has a stake in the game with its storage products. The rise of the software defined data center has also arrive in the IBM product palette, and Jamie Thomas presented advancements in software the space. A lot of that storage is more and more on SSD, an area where IBM showed solid arguments to convince CIOs to move to this new storage medium.
And of course IBM is good at honing the hybrid cloud message. With software defined loads on premise – compute, storage can float between on premise and public cloud resources, with Softlayer being part of the public cloud infrastructure.
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| Hybrid Cloud - where Software defined Storage plays |
MyPOV
A very good opportunity to visit the STG division, that after the sale of the x 86 business to Lenovo has less of a commodity business portion than probably ever before. With a full mainframe refresh cycle, new Power CPUs and interesting perspectives with Flash and hybrid clouds materializing, the 2015 outlook is good, as Tom Rosamilia confirmed on our question.
It was also good to see that the viability of the hybrid cloud offerings is quite high, certainly better than what I gleaned the other week at VMworld (Takeaways here). That said IBM needs to strengthen its software defined networking story that is intrinsically linked with moving storage and CPU loads.
Finally it was a refreshing change that all presentations were about product – and the analyst audience never had to figure out the demarcation between (software) product capability and service capability delivered by GBS, as we have struggled with at other IBM events earlier this year.
It was also good to see that the viability of the hybrid cloud offerings is quite high, certainly better than what I gleaned the other week at VMworld (Takeaways here). That said IBM needs to strengthen its software defined networking story that is intrinsically linked with moving storage and CPU loads.
Finally it was a refreshing change that all presentations were about product – and the analyst audience never had to figure out the demarcation between (software) product capability and service capability delivered by GBS, as we have struggled with at other IBM events earlier this year.
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More on IBM :
- News Analysis - IBM and Intel partner to make the cloud more secure - read here
- Progress Report - IBM BigData an Analytics have a lot of potential - time to show it - read here
- Event Report - What a difference a year makes - and off to a good start - read here
- First Take - 3 Key Takeaways from IBM's Impact Conference - Day 1 Keynote - read here
- Another week and another Billion - this week it's a BlueMix Paas - read here
- First take - IBM makes Connection - introduces the TalentSuite at IBM Connect - read here
- IBM kicks of cloud data center race in 2014 - read here
- First Take - IBM Software Group's Analyst Insights - read here
- Are we witnessing one of the largest cloud moves - so far? Read here
- Why IBM acquired Softlayer - read here
