IBM bets on the hybrid cloud

• The products gets ready for the hybrid cloud – In hindsight it became clear to me that 2014 was all setup by IBM to show that the vendor understood cloud, was ready for it and a player in the public cloud game. With that established, barbs traded with Amazon, IBM can now pivot to where both business and expertise are – in the combination and co-existence of both on premise and cloud assets for its customers. In short the hybrid cloud scenario. More specifically this means that new code needs to run on premise, and as new code is built with BlueMix, it means BlueMix needs to run on premise. And that is exactly what IBM unveiled with BlueMix Local. BlueMix Local enables customers to deploy BlueMix on local hardware, with IBM taking over the maintenance of the environment from a product code support perspective. More specifically this means that IBM will upgrade all BlueMix Local instances for the customer, in synch with BlueMix cloud releases. Or maybe a few days later. Cloud Purists will be shocked, but customers are likely to see value, e.g. in regulated industries, government, cloud sceptic and high latency geographies. Once you have the infrastructure to propagate and install code like this, it is also easy to create dedicated managed instances of BlueMix, something IBM calls BlueMix Dedicated and has signed a first partnership on this with Indian SI Tech Mahindra.

LeBlanc kicks of with Airbus

• The Organization gets ready for hybrid cloud – To enable the better support for hybrid cloud, IBM has re-organized its development organizations, pretty fundamentally. When a software vendor supports hybrid deployments, it can no longer align product organizations along deployment paths. Inevitably, the development organizations shifts into a matrix modus operandi, with assets being re-used in multiple product or deployment options. When the vendor, like IBM needs to execute a push in a certain direction (here cloud), it means that dotted reporting lines need to be created in the development organization. As such IBM has likely just done the most significant re-organization of its development organization. Speaking with IBM veterans the last similar re-organization of that scale was when IBM created the software group itself. More remarkably the newly created very large product teams have also gone new ways (for IBM) to organize themselves – one of the largest one opting for a functional organization with a centralized product management lead for the complete team. It’s good to see IBM taking bold steps to address the product development organization to align with what the vendor wants (and needs) to deliver to prospects and customers.
  Does it matter how vendors are organized in their product development organizations? Certainly, as software is still build by people and understanding as prospect, customer or ecosystem player how e.g. IBM is organized is important to understand when trying to predict future success, software quality and overall organizational agility.

Hybrid Cloud is the way forward

• BlueMix is the Future – As mentioned above, BlueMix is the PaaS but also the 21st century Rational for IBM, running on premise with the announcement of BlueMix Local. BlueMix is the way how IBM wants customers and developers to build applications, regardless of the deployment and operational model. While BlueMix is based on Pivotal CloudFoundry, it was interesting to see how IBM executives kept stressing how much more IBM had to create around CloudFoundry to make it work for the IBM purposes. And while in the past CloudFoundry was the one and only deployment option, with InterConnect it was clear that IBM considers CloudFoundry only as one of three deployment options, as BlueMix applications can be delivered to run on OpenStack as well as container (Docker – what else) environments. Considering BlueMix is not even one year old (it was launched February 28th 2014) it has made massive progress. A year ago IBM needed partners like Twilio to show standard orientation, partner openness and cool tools, as the vendor had very little functionality / services compared to today… Today BlueMix has over 50 services, and they are not lightweight, but real and key components to build a next generation application.
   

  3 User Categories

  
  So let’s look at the key BlueMix additions beyond Local / Dedicated (see above and the press release here):

• Container support – BlueMix goes the trend of time, but not without IBM making the containers ‘enterprise grade’ and containers deployable in a hybrid way.

• DataWorks comes to BlueMix – Originally a new development from the former InfoSphere family, DataWorks was everywhere with its capabilities to make sense, transform and combine data value added services. Something a PaaS needs, and IBM did well leveraging this asset.
• Collaborative Operations – With this IBM refers to the management tools for hybrid environments, a logical consequence from supporting hybrid.
• Orchestration – Vendors that support hybrid deployments create an orchestration problem, and IBM does well addressing that.
• Security – Always a potential concern and IBM is bringing its security assets to BlueMix, powered by analytics that predict threats and vulnerabilities.
• Secure Passport Services – When enabling hybrid operations, another set of security issues is introduced, using the passport concept to regulate what users are allowed and now allowed to do is a key consequence of supporting hybrid.
• API Harmony – No conference without API management these days and IBM is adding this service to BlueMix, too.
• Watson Zone – Watson brings a significant attraction and differentiation to BlueMix and IBM is shrewd at leveraging this capability in the new BlueMix Watson zone.

So overall good progress with BlueMix, which has focused IBM’s effort more than any development platforms of the last years. The bigger work that is happening behind the scenes is that IBM is working hard to realize the vision it laid out almost two years ago, with the API economy direction. And while BlueMix can consume existing and create next generation application APIs, IBM still needs to make APIs available for its 100+ product SaaS portfolio. And the code and deployment behind these applications needs to become more elastic to allow for cost efficient operations. Moreover IBM is active at signing up data provider partnerships, though it has stopped short of declaring that it is in the DaaS (Data as a Service) game (maybe we see at Insights 2015?).

Analyst Tidbits

• Has Watson stalled? In contrast to Insights 2014 we saw only little progress on the Watson side. And maybe the InterConnect dates came at a bad timing for the product, but it was disappointing to see the same partners and customer on stage at InterConnect as at Insights. And an exclusive Healthcare focus as in the keynote does not do a good service to the potential of Watson, something that was corrected in more detail sessions, but you only have one chance to make a keynote impression. More Watson APIs and Services in BlueMix is certainly the right direction, as it helps Watson adoption and gives BlueMix a unique differentiator in the PaaS market. And maybe we analysts just have too high expectations for Watson, the engineering challenges behind Watson are certainly not trivial.

Watson at MD Anderson Cancer Center

•  IBM Design is on track for its massive objective – It is around 2 years that IBM has started a push into the design space. The vendor has raised its profile in the creative and design community that is taking note of new developments like the IBM Design Language and a massive hiring drive. Like all vendors IBM has to address the challenge to move 100s of products and development teams and it has opted into a central hiring and training model that later embeds the designers with the product teams. It was good to see what thought has been put into putting designers into the right locations, work environment and review processes. In the past many UI initiatives at many vendors have fizzled, faced with the sheer enormous task. But the ongoing IBM effort is roughly 1/3 on the way in terms of product team reach, and the first results are encouraging.

SoftLayer expanding global footprint

• SoftLayer keeps plowing on – IBM announced new recent locations, as usual and seems to be on track for the declared 48 locations by end of 2015. When IBM finds something that works for its customers, it puts its weight behind it, and SoftLayer is a great showcase for that. The need for finding load remains and IBM keeps signing up large deals, but by mid-year it will really be time for a load check on how much runs in SoftLayer across the world. The addition of Power and Watson services will certainly help, with Watson IBM has the option to create a unique environment to operate cognitive (aka performance sensitive and potentially data sensitive applications) applications more locally around the world than any competitor. And the addition of container support in BlueMix allows for the operation of unique applications where the code comes to the data, not the classic model of the data having to find the code.

Tables + Power = Happy Analysts!

MyPOV