IBM Pulse2011 Conference: Helping Enterprises Get Smarter

Yogi Berra is quoted as saying, "This is like deja vu all over again," and that is what last week's IBM Pulse2011 conference in Las Vegas felt like. The event had the same title, "The Premier Service Management Event," and the subtitle, "Optimizing the World's Infrastructure," as last year's conference. This year's conference also had essentially the same message, with some exceptions, such as an emphasis on Smarter Computing. But that is not a bad thing. As was noted many times during Pulse2011, integrated service management is a journey. For most enterprises, that journey takes much longer than a year, so staying the course is important.

Of course, that does not mean that there were not a lot of announcements and a flurry of activity. Pulse2011 attendance was about 7,000, which is about 30 percent over last year. So there was a lot of hustling and bustling and, as an obvious proponent of IT, I found it a positive indication that the IT business is continuing to grow and change--hopefully, to the benefit of everyone.

Accurately describing integrated service management (ISM) would seem to require a sweeping IMAX presentation, so trying to boil it down is likely to leave out many key concepts. Still, I intend to try. ISM is about managing across all of the service supply chain, and that includes not only the infrastructure (physical in addition to digital), but also the people and processes that make that infrastructure function effectively and efficiently. Three key aspects of ISM are:

Now, enterprises are constantly changing, so integration will probably never be fully complete and ISM is probably a journey that will never end. But organizations that can pursue the old 80/20 rule--where 20 percent of the work yields 80 percent of the benefits--may find that ISM solutions can make a real difference.

Of course, ISM plays directly into IBM's Smarter Planet initiative, and driving the ISM push are the three key words of IBM's "interconnected," "instrumented" and "intelligent" Smarter Planet strategy. But what do these key words mean? IBM describes interconnected as being about people and systems that interact in new ways; instrumented as being about the ability to measure, sense and see the exact condition of everything; and intelligent as the ability of processes and assets to respond quickly and accurately to information that affects them.

IBM believes ISM revolves around visibility, control and automation--so much so that the company has trademarked "visibility, control and automation." IBM sees visibility as monitoring in real time; control as the ability to react quickly and effectively; and automation as the means to achieve efficiency. Of course, IBM gets down to technologies, and three key areas are cloud computing, workload-optimized systems and federated information.Naturally, at a large conference like Pulse, new product and initiative announcements fly fast and furious. However, the key for IBM seemed to be around its Smarter Computing initiative, which the company considers necessary to replace both the eras of centralized computing and distributed computing. Centralized computing is efficient, but provides limited access and flexibility. Distributed computing was innovative, but led to an IT infrastructure sprawl whose inefficiencies have led to higher than necessary IT total cost of ownership (TCO).

In IBM's view, Smarter Computing is both efficient and innovative, with new technologies designed to deal with the apparently insatiable demand for IT resources and overcome the pattern of unsustainable economics of distributed computing. IBM's Smarter Computing frees up money by reducing costs, such as server acquisition costs and power consumption. IBM believes that IT can then reinvest those savings without demanding extra resources to better provide what it is supposed to be doing--i.e., add value. Reinvesting cost savings can position IT to drive further innovations that IBM feels can enable new business models, create new revenue streams and transform business processes.

Let me touch upon two things that particularly caught my eye. The first was data reduction on primary disk systems, a subject that has been talked about for many years in the storage community. StorageTek had an innovative system called Iceberg in the early '90s that did compression on primary systems, but the approach never achieved popular acceptance. The thought is alluring though, as compression can save half or more of the space on disk, except in cases where data is uncompressible, such as with video files.

The problem with StorageTek's approach was not reliability, but rather transparency. You want a file to appear to be transparent to the user, the operating system and the backup application. That avoids problems with uncompressing the data. That not only saves CPU cycles but also means that compressed data can be used as backup, which speeds up backup process. Now, compression is a different data reduction technique than data deduplication, which typically must be performed before compression. However, that's not the case with IBM's approach. The company acquired from Storwize real-time compression capabilities that overcome the limitations of previous attempts.

In a breakout session, representatives from Allianz Life Insurance of the United Kingdom talked about the success that they had using IBM's real-time compression. At this time, the solution is limited to network-attached storage (NAS) systems using either CIFS or NFS, but that does not necessarily have to be the case in the future. Real-time compression may not be on the radar screens of most of IT professionals today, but that is likely to change in the future.Dean Kamen, inventor extraordinaire, was the keynote speaker at the Monday Pulse2011 session. Kamen is best known for the Segway Human Transporter, but his focus has primarily been on health-related items, such as an insulin pump and a prosthetic arm. Kamen leads one to believe that Thomas Edison is not dead; he has just been reincarnated. IBM gave Kamen time to describe FIRST (For Inspiration of Science and Technology), which he founded, and I want to provide some space, as well. FIRST has been very motivational for nearly 20 years in getting students inspired by science and technology, with the hope that they will seek careers in related fields. Since we need more scientists and engineers, this is a very worthwhile program, and you may very well want to learn more and possibly contribute your time and energy. Check it out for more details.

That conferences such as Pulse2011 are not only alive and well, but thriving and growing is a good thing, as they qualify as barometers for the IT world in which we all play a part. IBM's ISM vision certainly provides a panoramic view of where IT infrastructure is going, as well as of where the physical infrastructures on which businesses depend are headed.

However, we have to keep everything in perspective. One Pulse2011 speaker cited a quote attributed to William Gibson: "The future is now--it's just not very evenly distributed." That certainly is true. Some organizations will be further advanced on some dimensions of ISM than others. It is also true that some of the more advanced concepts have not been adopted by any organization yet, as their time is still to come. Overall, though, IBM's concept of ISM is a journey that enterprises cannot avoid. Each organization will have to proceed at its own pace. The power of IBM's approach to ISM is that it is both flexible and expansive enough to benefit organizations regardless of their current location.

IBM is currently a client of David Hill and the Mesabi Group.