IBM Edge2014 – Day 2 Delivering on the Promise of the Future Made with IBM

Continuing my coverage of the [IBM Edge2014 conference], IBM’s premiere conference for System Storage and related products, I attended keynote sessions on Tuesday morning, titled “Delivering on the Promise of the Future: Made with IBM”.

Once again, Stephen Leonard, IBM General Manager, STG Sales, served as emcee for this general session. Yesterday, the executives focused on the “What” and “Why” for new IT initiatives. Today, they want to tackle “How” to accomplish all this.

Robert LaBlanc, IBM Senior Vice President, Software and Cloud Solutions

Robert estimates that 70 percent of enterprises will pursue dynamic hybrid clouds by 2015. Big data and analytics represents a $17 trillion USD opportunity, about 25 percent of the total IT industry. IBM helps companies extend what they already have to what they need. In the future, people will ask “Who remembers building a private cloud stick-by-stick?” Today, IBM supports the deployment of patterns of expertise that can work on-premise IBM PureSystems. These can easily be moved or deployed off-premise to IBM SoftLayer private and public cloud offerings.

Snehal Antani, CIO of GE Capital

IT has shifted from the “back office” to the very core of business. Technology now allows GE Capital to go quickly from whiteboard to roll-out. Not everyone is on-board. At GE Capital, people are encouraged to be like [Tigger", the adorable character from Winnie the Pooh stories, to lead efforts of innovation and collaboration. Cynics are tagged as [Eeyores], always finding a reason or excuse why plans won’t work. Finally, we have “Kings and Queens”, eager to be offended that any changes are needed at all. Snehal also mentioned their “No squirrel” policy. If you have seen the movie “Up!”, you know that the dog was constantly distracted by squirrels, or things he thought were squirrels. Many IT people fall the latest “shiny object” in technology.

Arvind Krishna, IBM General Manager of Development and Manufacturing

Arvind feels that “data” is the new base of new business value, in the same manner as steam, electricity and hydrocarbons had done in past centuries. In the past, most data was stored in databases, but today over 90 percent is unstructured.

In 2008, there were more “things” than people attached to the Internet, and this [Internet of Things] is expected to exceed 1 trillion items by 2015. One of these things will be the [connected car]. By 2017, ABI Research predicts that [60 percent of cars will be connected by 2017]. Hopefully, resulting in 80 percent fewer serious accidents.

Mike North, Senior Director of NFL

Have you ever wondered how the NFL plans each year’s football game schedule, balancing 32 teams across five television networks? There are over 800 quadrillion possible combinations! Borrowing the analogy from Snehal from GE Capital, the football teams are the Eeyores, and the networks are the Kings and Queens. This year, three of the games will be played in London, England. With IBM’s help, the NFL was able to finish the 2014 schedule earlier than before.

Maria Winans, IBM Vice President, Social Business

Maria started with an interesting anecdote: Lily Robinson, age 3, sent a letter asking a local grocery chain Sainsbury why their “tiger bread” was not called “giraffe bread” as it looked more like the spots on a giraffe. A manager provided a nice reply. Her parents posted it on social media, the conversation went viral, and [Sainsbury changed the name of their product] to “giraffe bread”. This is an example of “People-centric” engagement, rather than dealing with consumers in marketing segments or categories of gender or race. People will share personal data with companies they trust. Smarter companies use this data to provide the right experience at exactly the right time.

Maria explained IBM AlwaysOn Engagement Center which allows companies to track social mentions. For example, there were over 52 million social mentions of IBM Edge 2014 so far during its first two days! The process is not just for clients, customers and consumers. It can be used to engage individual employees to drive business outcomes, or individual citizens to deliver sustainable economic growth and improve living standards.

This was a nice balance, combining IBM executives with client testimonials.

For those on Twitter, my handle is @az990tony and the hashtag for this event was #ibmedge.