As an industry analyst, you attend numerous vendor and cloud technology events every year. But events where all sessions solely targeted the industry analyst community are rare today, so it was a unique experience to attend the IBM Analyst Insights conference that featured industry analyst keynotes, mini-tents and breakouts. Although the event primarily targeted IBM’s Software Group (SWG), the event for 2013 would be great if it covered both hardware and software subjects.
It was refreshing to see all presentations focus on mapping IBM capabilities to business needs, even though the primary business of the SWG is to sell software products. These capabilities cover a majority of business needs, so the conference was relatively short since there wasn’t enough time for attendees to attend all sessions that could have been of interest. I will cover some interesting topics that came to my attention, which could be classified under one of the major forces transforming the IT ecosystem today: Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud.
Social: The IBM Social Business strategy consists of three major and integrated themes: analytics for front office processes, enhancements via human capital management and delivering exceptional web experiences for employees and customers. While these provide solutions for pressing customer needs, the recent Kenexa acquisition will provide a boost to IBM’s employee-facing capabilities. In my opinion, the company is trailing nimble technology organizations in talent acquisition. As a result, IBM is adapting to changing market conditions and intends to leverage Kenexa internally as a tool to attract top talent throughout their organization.
Mobile: Organizations are embracing mobile in a big way to enable them to gain workforce efficiency benefits, as well as better engaging customers by delivering a personalized experience. As with nearly all enterprise technologies, mobile enterprises need to consider the appropriate levels of security. IBM provides security at the server level through the Worklight acquisition, which should help the company capture business. Additionally, IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile devices addresses security concerns at the device level. Utilizing governed policy and context to automatically determine capabilities delivered through mo- bile devices is a unique benefit that removes barriers for a wide spectrum of enterprise mo- bile applications. For example, a physician could have capabilities reduced if he/she is accessing a health care application from a coffee shop versus an emergency room.
Analytics: This area has two items of interest.
1. So far, IBM’s analytics capabilities have mainly focused on solutions that came to the company through its acquisitions of Cognos and SPSS. However, the company has added the capabilities of InfoSphere to deliver a unique architecture that pulls in new sources of unstructured data sources for improved analytics. This allows users to view structured, unstructured and real-time data through a single view.
2. Extending security intelligence with Big Data analytics was another capability that showed a new approach. Expanding its security platform to include Big Data sources will help customers collect, store, analyze and react to massive amounts of security data, help- ing them deal with new challenges.
Cloud: One of the little known facts about IBM’s software portfolio is that it includes about 60+ Business Process-as-a-Service (BPaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings in key areas such as social, commerce and analytics. The company’s BPaaS offering are not well known outside their traditional outsourcing customers, so there should be a huge opportunity to open these offerings up for partners to build offerings and make them available as add-ons to current offerings, similar to what some SaaS vendors already provide.
IBM recognizes that clients want an easy-to-acquire-and-use capability, and the company is building a rich portfolio of offerings to meet that market need. Creating an opportunity or avenue for partners to gain additional revenue would be a smart business move by IBM that would also improve BPaaS/SaaS capabilities, drawing new customers to the company’s offerings.
During one session, an IBM executive referred to how “systems of engagement” (situational needs) differ from the concept of systems of record(s) (traditional operations) originally postulated by technology consultant Geoffrey Moore. IBM defines systems of engagement as those that integrate existing operational systems with rapid delivery of new client-facing social apps, like Google+, LinkedIn & Twitter. IBM is one of the few companies that can deliver these features across domains that require social, mobile, weaving together integration and analytic capabilities.
In conclusion, IBM currently has a wealth of SaaS offerings that the company is integrating into capabilities to address changing customer needs and transforming IT ecosystems. It remains to be seen how IBM will successfully transform itself to successfully develop, sell and market these offerings to the business community.