While we “don’t do numbers” here at RedMonk, I come across many interesting ones each week. Here are some:

IBM Connect 2009

This week, all of RedMonk was at the IBM software group’s Connect event (see my notes on the event as well as James’ note). These events always have a blur of fun numbers, here are some:

• “IBM’s software business contributes $20B of IBM’s revenue and 40% of its profits” (from a June 2008 bio of SWG head, Steve Mills).
• On Lotus Connections installs, from James: “Lotus Connections: 385k seats at HSBC [another figure], 40k Coke Cola. 20k at Sogeti, 16k at Canadian Defense. 500k more seats in last 2 weeks.”
• Employees for IBM Software Group: “59,000 Employees Worldwide, 36 Major R&D Locations, 25,000 Developers, 11,000 Field Technical Support, 23,000 Sales/Marketing/Admin” (from Steve Mills’ keynote)

Chip Share

“I’m looking forward to a future where our ability to succeed in business is governed by the quality of our products and our customer relationships. That hasn’t always been true in the past but in the future it will be,” he said.

It’s an uphill battle for AMD, however. Intel extended its share of CPU shipments to 81.1 percent in the third quarter, while AMD’s share declined slightly to 18.7 percent, according to figures from IDC.

Windows 7 – in your face, Apple!

Ballmer noted that “96 times out of 100, worldwide, people choose a PC with Windows.”

He added that even in the toughest market–the high end of the U.S. consumer market–Windows is chosen 83 times out of 100.

“That doesn’t let us rest on our laurels,” Ballmer said. “Apple has picked up a couple tenths of a percent of market share.”

Growth means data canters – never mind that cloud hoopla

APAC continues to astound me with its growth. The financial crisis seems to have just glanced by. One lagging indicator of how well an economy is doing is the job market – all the large global banks – Merrill, SCB, Barclays, UBS – have 100s of jobs open in Singapore. We all have known for a while that APAC would be the next market, the difference now is that all the large globals are establishing large physical presence in APAC. They are now installing large datacenters, and are placing executives in APAC. ISVs and our other partners are growing their presence, in particular hiring local talent, replacing the expat personnel that had previously established satellite offices in APAC.

We all the know about the growth rates of China and India, there is a new statistic that came out earlier this week – the World Wealth Report released its annual report which states that the number of millionaires in China now exceeds the number in the UK. The only countries with more millionaires than China today are US, Japan and Germany. The number of high net worth individuals (those with USD1M or more in investable assets) are expected to grow at a rate of 12.3% a year in Singapore, versus 7% in the US. This shift of wealth from “west to east” is likely to continue, with APAC predicted to overtake North America as the largest center of wealth by 2013.

Who says there’s no money in open source?

Our revenue and expenses are consistent with 2007, showing steady growth. Mozilla’s consolidated reported revenues (Mozilla Foundation and all subsidiaries) for 2008 were $78.6 million, up approximately 5% from 2007 reported revenues of $75.1 million. The majority of this revenue is generated from the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox from organizations such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and others.

(Via @IanSkerrett)

Gartner’s Cloud Predictions

Cloud-based business processes are the largest portion of the cloud services market, which includes advertising, e-commerce, human resources, and payments processing, and Gartner forecast 19.8 percent growth in the segment to $46.6 billion this year. Advertising-supported services, such as those provided by Google and emulated by Microsoft, Yahoo, and others, account for 60 percent of overall cloud services and will remain the largest component through 2013, Gartner said.

So…that’s $18.64B in “real” cloud stuff?

This week’s layoffs

Adobe, maker of the Flash technology that powers many online videos and games, and maker of popular design software Photoshop, announced today that it’s cutting 680 full-time jobs, totaling around 9 percent of its workforce.

The news follows several other unpleasant announcements from Adobe over the past year. The company already announced plans to cut 600 jobs a year ago.

Rack ‘em and Pack ‘em

The company reported stronger financial results based on customer growth. Rackspace is currently managing 54,655 servers as of the third quarter. Rackspace has a total of 80,944 customers.

And as for the cloud, we finally have some revenue numbers for the cloud space, here for the Rackspace Cloud:

The company has been pushing into the business of so-called “cloud” computing, allowing customers to store data online rather than on their own servers. It says cloud revenue climbed 17 percent from the second quarter to $15.3 million. The segment now accounts for about 10 percent of revenue, up from 5 percent a year ago.

Google is like a blind dog in a meathouse – if they can smell it, they are going to bite it.
–Steve Mills at Connect 2009

This year’s IBM analyst event was much better packed with meaty information than lasts. It seems there’s been a fair amount of work – esp. around cloud, but also with Lotus – over the past year. While there was still plenty about IBM’s Industry Framework air-ware (key insight here from talking with IBM’s John Soyring: at its core, frameworks are about shoring up business process and then tweaking that process and the connecting systems for businesses), that was more the context to rest everything else in instead of the main conversation, as it was in 2008.

And, the four RedMonks were finally together in the same place, as pictured above.

Here’s a wrap-up of my notes from the event:

• Day one morning wrap-up – Summary of analytics and image sessions at the IBM analyst event, hopes for the rest of the show.
• Day one afternoon wrap-up – Steve Mills keynote, Tivoli overview, dev/ops.
• IBM Lotus – Lotus has come a long way in the Enterprise 2.0 space. Can they keep going?
• Lunch with the Systems Software Group – virtualization, operating systems, and hardware.
• Cloud – IBM seems to have a rich buffet now, and the question is how many times do you go back and fill your plate?

Also, see James’ coverage.

Disclosure: IBM paid T&E and is a client.

For sometime now – ever since we said “SaaS” instead of “cloud” – us analysts have been beating up IBM about not being cloudy enough. Well, they sure jammed out head in a bucket of water this year. The burger diagram above seems to have captured just about every nook and cranny of cloud computing. I think you can even see one little box that says “simple” in there ;>

And that’s the damned if you do, damned if you don’t problem for IBM an the cloud. If they keep it simple, we all assume they have nothing. If they show-off how detailed they can understand and model it, those of us not in a burger-induced coma (like me), will do a reverse emperor in no clothes on them: they’re too baroque.

Truly, for those architecture-by-magazine types, IBM looks to have an impressive cloud story now. Is the CIO demanding cloud technology? Well, not only can IBM serve up a 50 course meal, they can detail why you should eat every bite.

“Advances in Data Center Automation Enable Cloud Computing”

While cloud floated into just about every talk, Tivoli’s VP Strategy and Product Management, Wing To dived the most into it from the IT side (that is, not from the SaaS pie Lotus served from). Aside from giving us analysts a well deserved blizzard of cloud boxes (which I hope they don’t give to customers unless they really, really want it) he nudged up against the most important aspect of why cloud computing seems like it’ll matter for mainstream IT: delivering software faster, or, as Lauren States put it, the “pressure to accelerate the delivery of function.”

As Wing To outlined with a couple cases – esp. one from Korea’s SK Telcom – companies are being pressured to deliver new IT-driven offerings (IT-driven “services” that their customers use) more frequently for ever, usually of smaller scope and value, but in aggregate huge differentiators for the companies. That is, “dumb pipe” companies like telcos, cable operators, and others who’re looking to sell services beyond sheer utility that their customers care about and will pay for. The cloud pivot point here that anyone from IBM (or any other elder company) will all but say is that all that traditional IT they’ve been sold over the years isn’t agile enough. They need something different, faster, more agile, and (many would say) cheaper. Salesforce is the Luther here, but we’re far from mass-schisms.

Good luck storming the castle!

Most of the focus on IBM-driven cloud computing was in getting from here to there and the effort actually looked like it’d be hell. More generally, this is about how much transition work cloud computing as a mainstream IT practice needs. Short of skipping the whole thing and going public cloud or really skipping the whole think and going SaaS, many companies are in for endless bowls of legacy porridge.

On the bright side, the reality will probably look more like small, spike-like projects that get applied more broadly, starting with modernizing (or just getting) automation frameworks. Like I said: if IBM started with the lean burger, we’d jump on them for not having the fat burger.

And that’s the whole thing: what are the drivers to manage your own, private cloud? They usually boil down to non-technological constraints like regulations, the need for control, and customization. On the last item, To summarized an interesting customer sentiment: we want to make sure there’s choice, the customers have been saying, but not too much choice.

There’s something missing from all the private cloud talk, and, short of public cloud and SaaS adoption over private cloud baby-steps, that missing thing seems to be forcing developers and operations to be on the same team. IBM seems to be mounting that horse with their Rational/Tivoli dev/ops aligning, but that’s just beginning. Much of legacy IT is too creaky to benefit from both Agile Development and Agile Infrastructure and I’m hoping we’ll see more from cloud vendors to protect cloud computing from legacy gangrene.

Disclosure: IBM paid T&E to the event and is a client. See the RedMonk clients list for other relevant clients.

While at the IBM software group analyst event this year, along with several other analysts, I was invited to a lunch from the IBM systems group (or, “STG”) – hardware, from x to z, including storage. In particular, it was the new general manager, Helene Armitage, for software in the systems group talking about the growing importance of software for selling hardware. While IBM has Tivoli, the systems group maintains its own management software and, of course, operating systems and virtualization that goes along with it. (See Timothy Prickett Morgan‘s piece from today for more background on the group and execs.)

Aside from introducing a bunch of (presumably) software-centric analysts (like myself) to the systems side of software, the main themes were:

• Getting closer ties with the software group – they want to be “the foundation for what [Steve] Mills builds on,” as they GM said.
• Modernizing the talk around IBM’s platforms – see below.

There weren’t any launches or anything, but the GM did start to outline some interesting initiatives and positions, highlights below:

• From general purpose to specialized boxes – responding the Unified Compute ideas from Cisco and the like, but also the fact that massive cloud providers seem to demand customized boxes, a lot of the discussion got to providing more specialized boxes. Things like the CloudBurst box and iDataPlex which, you could lazily call an appliance, but are really big boxes and racks custom built for a specific way of using hardware.
• Jonathan Eunice of Illuminata asked about the dev/ops effect on hardware, pointing out that systems providers that cater to that kind of IT-think will be in a good position if it hits big. Those of you out there, dear readers, who put up with my incessant rambling on this topic know I’d violently agree. Indeed, the willingness that the GM represents from STG to cater to IT staff beyond box-only performance-hog mentality is a big opportunity. As Eunice also rightly pointed out, it’s certainly a chink in the enterprise infrastructure status quo‘s armor that VMWare/SpringSource is looking to build go through – it doesn’t seem like anyone else has noticed that ever widening hole. Key here for IBM is focusing on function, not the specific hardware. Outside of the traditional customer base and (to be it tongue in check) “those who know better” trying to sell anything but x86 here will be like the bad old days of American car companies competing with imports. That said, there was mention of selling 50 new z (mainframe) customers last year – I’m pretty sure we’re a long way from a mainframe renaissance, though.
• There’s a high degree of virtualization agnosticism – VMWare, Hyper-V, Xen, KVM, z/VM, and PowerVM: pick your poison. The x86 chip crew does a good enough job, it seems, tooling silicon up for hypervisors, and IBM has its own chips covered. Gear heads will go on about z and Power virtualization, which is fine for existing folks, but the same rule of dev/ops applies: either speak to x86 or speak only to function and benefit.
• To the point of all this function and benefit over spec, the GM summed it up nicely herself: on client calls “we spend more time now talking about the software instead of the hardware.” Part of that is the fact that a thick generation of IT buyers are conditioned to desire commodity hardware over specialized boxes.
• One analyst asked about networking. As the GM said, prefacing it with a “this is my view,” but, “IBM is not the network company.” Too bad that token ring thing didn’t work out.
• While STGs has it’s own stable of operating systems, Linux is still a big deal for them. Indeed, as the GM said, “I think we’ve had a fundamental impact on the Linux industry that we’re happy with.”
• The GM saw STG as being geared up for (private) cloud delivery, but the articulation of how exactly it fit in wasn’t detailed. Granted, Tivoli operates here, and the CloudBurst offerings are cloud-bound. Still, like most of IBM’s cloud programs to date, there’s a distinctly Blue cloud feel to it – not that we know what clouds any color except Amazon really look like, really. There are certainly “cloud in a box” offerings from IBM now, but I haven’t gotten a feel for how those are being received in IT departments. Part of that is that it’s too early to tell, while the other part is increasingly skepticism on my part that “private cloud” is, long term, a good thing or, best case, something that you could fairly compare to (public) cloud.

It’s worth tying in a some commentary from Steve Mills’ closing Q&A here. Judith Hurwitz asked him how he’d run software at HP. As part of an answer that he summed up at the beginning as “the way we’ve done it at IBM for the past 20 years,” Mills said the different IBM groups spend much effort on staying independent from each other. Though they don’t have to rely on each other for success, they can leverage each other for additive success, he said, making a somewhat subtle distinction. Clearly, Mills implication was that HP wasn’t being run this way.

Mapping that view in, it makes organization sense for systems to maintain its own software group rather than shove it all off onto Mills plate. And, as several analysts smirked over the STG steaks, governments might just go anti-trust crazy if the two were merged any closer – a smirk I’m not really qualified to judge.

Whatever the tie-up or the implications, STGs biggest challenge is the same as its been in recent years: convincing people to buy more than commodity (HP, Dell, etc.) boxes and storage. Typically, this means selling new functionality and benefits rather than the naked boxes themselves which, really, is mostly about software.

Disclosure: IBM paid T&E and is a client. See the RedMonk client list for other relevant clients.

There were a couple Lotus sessions at this year’s IBM analyst summit, Connect. Overall, Lotus seems to finally be in a good position with respect to modernizing its previously antiquated offerings and has rapidly built up impressive numbers in the SaaS and social networking business. They’ve been working on this for awhile now, and this year, to hear them tell it, they’ve finally delivered.

LotusLive, IBM’s PaaS Platform in Action

The first session, presented by Bob Picciano and Sean Poulley, covered LotusLive, Lotus’ SaaS offerings. Here and across on-premise Lotus, there were many impressive numbers and as James pointed out, while folks like Salesforce are launching social networks, Lotus seems to have a huge number of installs already and much more in the works.

The cranky-pants issue with Lotus in the context of the software group is that Lotus tends to sell as applications, ruining the whole “we just do middleware” Software Group line. The pricing of things like iNotes is clearly a move into non-enterprise pricing and selling. The good side is that Lotus should provide an example of IBM converting its offerings to a more cloud centric delivery model. If Ray Wang’s on-premise vs. SaaS trend spotting is correct, ISVs have some serious writing on the wall to deal with: namely, going SaaS.

To the actual meat: the Lotus Connection offerings are really behind the firewall or SaaS versions of services you could cobble together with public Web 2.0 and social networking sites – except that the cobbled Connections would be in the public, under “we co-own your IP” EULAs. Instead, there’s our typical, enterprise prayer beads: security, policy enforcement, integrations to other systems and infrastructure (and services like Salesforce), and the catch for enterprise salvation, compliance. Queue the jokes about execs in orange jump suits!

Lotus Connections & Lotus Research

In another session, Jeff Schick and Irene Greif went over existing Lotus Connections technologies. After Jeff covered some impressive numbers for Lotus Connections, some cases, and an overview of functionality (see the break-out above), Irene went over some research projects (out of many in the social space) that may surface as products one day. That’s a likely path as many of Lotus’ social networking applications followed a similar route.

Vivacity

This project was all about tracking what users do in communities (like Lotus Connections) and even on their desktop (like viewing a presentation). The goal being to get analytics on what users are doing in these social networks. I asked what you’d do with that data and Irene said there are the obvious things like seeing how active a community is, but also bumped up against using the analytics to better tune the community and, presumably, the process in IT.

Agora

Here, we have a service for taking recorded Unyte sessions (or other sourced video?) and adding in follow-along transcripts and timeline tags. Wrapped up in that, of course, is searching over the text. The goal was to get people using video more as a resource which, Irene said, most people don’t really do – preferring text, I presume.

I asked if all the meta-data (time-coded transcripts, tags, etc.) was in XMP or some other open(ish) media format. The point being this meta-data infused, otherwise “incomprehensible media” (as Dan Farber once dubbed video) could be created and/or used outside the player we saw. It seemed like not, though Jeff jumped in and said that some media-production oriented customers had expressed interest in something along those lines. I also incorrectly called it “XMPP” instead of “XMP.”

Creative Suite uses XMP, and their video editing tool-chain has some of the potential here, but CS4 is not really an application along these lines, just tools to produce the content for one. Note to Adobe, then: this is all good stuff to add to Acrobat.com.

Topika

Covered quickly at the end, the idea here was to rich up email so that folks who wanted to could stick with email as their all-in-one tool. If the amount of complaining from the 2.0 freakoid crowd about the lack of email integration in Google Wave is any indication, email ain’t going away anytime soon.

The Challenge – Keeping Up

While the portfolio looks good now, this category demands rapid innovation, delivery, and then catching up when you’re caught driving too slow. Getting to this point has taken Lotus a long time, and hopefully the more cloud-centric model means they can avoid getting in a rut again. Cocky startups with little more than a gut feeling for how to spell “enterprise” can and have been making mean donuts in the collaboration parking-lot, detracting from a slow moving 16 wheeler like Lotus.

Thus far, aside from Outblaze, Lotus has followed a very non-acquisition fueled path (perhaps indicating that technology in the collaboration space isn’t “defensible,” that is, it’s easy to code it up on your own instead of having to buy the company) so it’ll have to run a super-efficient development and release engine to keep up with the Enterprise 2.0 donut crew.

That crew has their own problems – see the enterprise rosary above – and other elder companies like SAP have similar problems (and, even worse, bi-directional Stockholm syndrome), but tend to buy themselves the needed catch-up. From past performance, I have to be professionally skeptical about Lotus keeping up the pace, but it’d be great to be proven wrong. That said, what they have now looks good, and the key for IT decision makers ongoing is getting a gut feel for how long Lotus can keep it going.

Disclosure: IBM paid T&E and is a client. Adobe is a client as well. See the RedMonk client list for other relevant clients.

After this morning’s more technical sessions, the afternoon of the IBM analyst event this year reinforced the non-technology driven speaking-agenda that IBM has been going on about over the past year, that being “Smart Planet.” That phrase has has come to wrap two things:

• The Internet of Things realized in an industrial form – sensors, RFIDs, masses of data and meta-data encrusting every box in your business process diagram and figuring out what to do with all that crust.
• Industry frameworks – while IBM software will say it doesn’t do applications, what it’s doing here is moving the discussion of software away from a technological one into vertical specific uses of that technology, like waste water management. Here, you can take any type of industry and slap “smart” in front of it, and you’ve got the idea, e.g., Smart Water.

When IBM first foisted this framing on us analysts, it drove us all mad: we don’t like following business as a technology in itself, we just like technology. What IBM’s trying to do is make businesses more programmable, essentially, by injecting enough IT as possible into every part of it. Then, assuming a business is properly “instrumented,” you just roll out changes to the technology to change the business. That’s the metaphor at least, and it’s driving towards IBM hoping to create a new market for its assets.

Peppered through-out this high-level stuff are glimpses of what the new, underlying technology is and some cases of how customers are using this new technology. It can be frustrating, for example, to sit through a Tivoli talk and just get to actual products, services, and new features therein in the last part of the talk.

In that context, here are some highlights for the afternoon here:

General Session – Steve Mills

The context above was mostly drawn out here, with some interesting technology/innovation bullet points:

• If you’ve seen the usual “what IBM (software) is doing now” overview, there wasn’t much different. The point of all this Smart Planet framing is that “it opens the door to line of business people, not just IT people,” as Steve Mills put it.
• There’s a certain business process fed by new analytics, Big Data, and internet of things potentials: instrumenting everything in the business process, collecting data from that instrumentation, then analyzing and making business decisions (things to change or not change to make more money, with a whole lot of business modeling and high-performance, as near as possible real-time processing. You know, dry-cleaned cyberpunk, man.
• IBM’s client strategy is a mixture of Eclipse on the desktop and then Ajax on the web. There was a mention of a (browser?) plugin as a way to do more traditional desktop GUI tasks with a web app (mostly synchronized web stuff), but I think I’m reading too much into it to think it’s some sort of Gears/HTML 5 dream. As far as Ajax, dojo seems to still be the leader for IBM.
• James on this UI stuff: “Steve Mills just laid out the IBM Client architecture strategy. it didn’t actually say Eclipse RCP or OSGi on the slide.”
• When it comes to cloud, Steve Mills was one of the early dismissive guys – he had Larry beat by a solid year or two! He played up to this schtick and then bludgeoned the analysts with one of the most in-depths decompositions of cloud stacks (for IaaS and PaaS) I’ve seen. As he said, there’s an IBM PaaS platform and practices floating around, namely the one that drives Lotus Live. He didn’t say as much, but the implication of all those architecture diagram burgers (I’d hope) was that IBM was productizing it somehow. I’ll see if I can get a copy of the diagrams: they were beefy.
• Indeed, the two phrase Mills used here were “Common Cloud Services Platform” (the PaaS stuff) and “Common Cloud Management Platform” (the stuff used to build and manage cloud-driven infrastructure).
• “Prima donnas vs. knuckle-draggers” – skirting around the background here – and planned for a breakout session sometime during this event – is paying attention to the developer/operations workflow, collaboration, or whatever you want to call the process. Rational and Tivoli have been talking about this issue of late, and it’ll be great to see how it compares to the meat-cloud discussion going on now.
• Finally, as many analysts Twittered, of HP buying 3Com, Mills said he doesn’t like buying down-market, implying that 3Com was…down-market.

Service Management, Tivoli, and Smart Planet

Al Zollar’s Tivoli talk has reflected the business vs. technology split IBM’s been dealing with. Tivoli talks start out speaking about non-IT networks that Tivoli is helping manage – energy, water, etc. – and then quickly wraps up with some new technology highlights:

• The Smart Planet cases highlighted Tivoli being used outside of the data center for waste water system maintenance, a more classic IT story with storage virtualization for INTTRA, using Tivoli to automate recovery actions for banking compliance, and securing smart meter networks. Point being that these are instances of Tivoli managing businesses, not just managing IT.
• Scaling back to good, old-fashioned IT management, Zollar hit up the “we’ve got everything” angle for Tivoli IT Management. This is, of course, the Big 4 sale: the sum is more (important) than its parts.
• Finally, Zollar went over some different deployment and packaging options for the Tivoli stack like the two appliances (for applications and service management) as well as Tivoli Live.

That whole dev/ops thing

The last session of the day was co-hosted by Rational and Tivoli GMs Danny Sabbah and Al Zollar on the topic of getting development and operations to be more friendly with each other. There were several good wall of confusion slides to make the point about the prima donnas (dev) and knuckle-draggers (ops) thinking poorly of each other. And while there was no one product or even set of practices that IBM seems to be going to market with at the moment, the promise was that they were working on it.

Much of the emphasis revolved around “meta-data” and policy enforcement. The idea being to have more feedback and enforcement between development and operations with respect to what the production system would/must look like. Danna Garder raised the idea of PaaSes having enough constraints that there’s not really much of dev/ops hand-off. Indeed, slicing in virtualization, automation, and the sort of melding of the developer and operations role you hear at places like Velocity is the dream of all this dev/ops business.

Our own James Governor forcefully suggested that the problem was simply companies wanting to development on the cheap. He kept quoting Deutsche Bank wanting to pay £300 a day for a developer as not being enough to get top quality development. The issue being that if the Ration/Tivoli offering was promising cheap costs, then the result would still be cheap. The discussion here merged into the usual “the top percentages best practices don’t apply to the lower percentage” discussion that you get involved in during software deliver productivity blue skying: whatever rockin’ stuff Google is doing isn’t going to work at Boring Giant Company, Inc.

At this point, the discussion for IBM is about potentials vs. shipping product. Interestingly, Zollar said that their customer base is not actively asking for this tighter dev/ops integration: “the marketplace is not pulling this out of us.” Which gets to the pacing IBM takes with concepts like these. We’ll have to check in next year and see what’s happened. It’s a tough nut to crack without being too disruptive.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and paid T&E.

Each year, the software group at IBM puts on an analyst event, this year in Stamford, Connecticut. All 4 of the RedMonks are here as its a good chance to get an update on what IBM’s done over the past year and, better, start to figure out what they’ll be doing. Thus far I’ve attended two sessions:

Advanced Analytics with Brenda Dietrich

Joined with the hype over Big Data (the potential to do more number crunching and analytics due to advances in technologies that make it cheaper and faster) I’m always curious what companies are actually using it for beyond the Web 2.0 examples. Starting with a basic overview of what “analytics” actually means in a business context (create a model, test a hypothesis that helps you decide something to change, feed the results back in the chain, repeat) Dietrich then went into some customer cases of Big Data analysis that were actually pretty grounded:

• The US Social Security Administration speeding up part of their paper-work process.
• New York State figuring out the best ways, per type of person, to collect delinquent taxes
• A South African cellphone company using analytics to study clusters of people (as determined by their call logs) and figure out why they cancel their subscriptions.
• A power company figuring optimizing the way it runs its grid based on analytics (I admit, I didn’t catch it fully).
• IBM sales running analytics over sales and accounts to make sure they were maxing out their customer budgets – collecting the maximum amount of cash they have for IT.

(On the topic of base lining what all this analytics hoopla is about, I enjoyed Milton Michael’s Data Analysis book – I’m one of those guys who took math for poets in college, so I need anything beyond addition spelled out real easy.)

Image management with David Linquist and Pratik Gupta

I was only in this session for the first half (due to a nice ColdFusion cloud update), but they jumped into the demo quickly and went over all the different storage back-ends for images. Of course, in the back of my head the whole time was the Big Foil Ball polemic. As Pratik Gupta said, managing operating systems is pretty easy, it’s those pesky applications and all the configuration that comes with them that cause the problems.

The cloud angle – the full session title was “The Next Wave of Image Management with Virtualizaton and Cloud Computing” – was using S3 (and, presumably, other cloud storage) to host the image library and also deploy images to behind-the-firewall or beyond. There was even some CMDB talk with one analyst asking how all this was accounted for CI-wise.

Sitting in the session, it’s clear that the Puppet, Chef, and other next generation automation/image management people still have their work cut out for them when it comes to traditional enterprises: there’s no end to the need for “the old way of doing it didn’t work, the new way does” case studies from that crowd.

The other open question with IBM is always around what their virtualization alliances are and will be. Here, image management worked with VMWare and KVM, and there was much hope and use around OVF, either using it straight up or extending it.

Others

I hear there was some exciting Hadoop stuff from the IBM labs in another session. James was certainly excited about it. The rest of the event is a mix of general session – from Steve Mills, head of IBM Software, and others – and more break-out sessions.

What I’m looking for here is how IBM is going to motivate the world’s enterprises to spend money on all these new geegaws and technologies. We seem to be at another point in IT innovation where the features and functionality available are far ahead of what companies are asking for (or know to ask for). The stuff of cloud-nut daily frothing like advanced development and automation, for example, are too uncontrolled, unknown, and new at this point for companies to quantify the risks and benefits of use. Companies like IBM (and all its peers) along with the associated communities need to help IT (and their companies) transition to using these new technologies without slicing off too many toes in the process.

IBM’s done a good job over the past year creating the start for desire in companies – think about all those blue-barred ads and industry frameworks like SAFE (video above) – but there’s been an open question of how IBM can insert itself into scenarios like FedEx Critical’s truck tracking, an enterprise-class application that didn’t seem to involve IBM in a big way. That’s why examples from the analytics session above are interesting: they’re examples of IBM getting paid to help customers take advantage of new technologies instead of just managing older ones.