This morning is the last day of the IBM Systems & Technology Group Analyst Summit, packed with a couple of panels and then (for me) winter air-travel roulette through O’Hare. I’m betting on snow. See the highlights from yesterday as well. Here are some highlights from the morning:

• Rod Adkins opened with a brief talk going over revenues and R&D spend at IBM.
• Since Oracle/Sun, Rod said, we think we’ve won well over 100 opportunities against their top 300 customers (that is, a 1/3 of top account). And if you look at the GB [SMB] space, we’ve had another 100 wins.
• Research spend break out for IBM groups is: STG at 47%, SWG at 40%, Research 13%.
• IBM’s Robert LeBlanc moderated the first panel – the usual prepaired mini-talks, but hey – with Jai Menon (IBM, CTO, VP, Technical Strategy), Bijan Davari (Next Generation Systems and Technology), David Lindquist (VP, CTO of Tivoli), Matt Leininger (Livermore labs).
• The word from Bijan was that there wasn’t much more room for performance leaps in chips, which is one of those problems that’s been kicking around a lot recent. Instead of focusing just on processors to speed things up, then, you’ll have to tune other parts of the system, building “accelerators.” This fits with the System x contains more than just a generic pizza from yesterday.
• Asked to summarize the types of innovations Tivoli is working on, David Lindquist said it’s around virtualization, standardization [of parts of the infrastructure stack], both of which lead to “extensive amounts of automation.” The goal of using these new things in IT management is “fundamentally lowering the cost of managing systems and dramatically increasing the pace at which you can deliver services.” I’m always a big fan of the second and, actually, the whole bucket of ideas is about the best hope for what “private cloud” will be, even if the moniker is a bit rankling.
• As Merv summarized it, Matt said that “simulation is now a key pillar of science, enabling revolutionary breakthroughs.”
• The take-away from this panel – as has been the general theme of most all talks here – was that integrated systems are the best way to go for performance, cost, and all that. As one of the panelist summed it up: “It’s hard to innovate within silos [the opposite of being integrated –Coté]. Really the next generation of [things] can only come in an integrated way.” Looking at new innovations in hardware, like SSDs, he continues, “to really take advantage of those things, it’s going to change the operating system, the database system – you’ve got change the whole stack.”
• The next panel was run by Mark Shearer (VP Marketing Communications, Sales Support) and packed with IBM Fellows and Distinguished Engineers: Cod Barrera (Chief Technical Strategist Storage), Gregg McKnight (VP, System x), Guru Rao (Systems Chief Engineer, System z), Brad McCredie (VP, Power), Satya Sharma (Systems Software). Here, the idea was to speak to innovations in the works – driven by new customers needs like better power management, mostly – across the different systems and storage.
• The panel opened up discussing the impact of Smart Planet think on their various systems. Essentially, there’s more data in lumpy, rather than regular, loads. For the z and other folks, there was much focus on using new technologies to speed up and enable more analytics and raw data processing, doing OLTP and the like optimizations with integrated systems.
• Then the discussion moved to how reducing power consumption has become a key driver for systems design. The general goal here, most emphasis by Power’s Brad “No Socks” McCredie is to “keep taking the cost out of computing… To reduce [customer’s] total cost of ownership.”
• On that topics, McCredie continued (not an exact quote): 10, 5 years ago performance was all that mattered, so everything (in a computer) was on, at full speed all the time. Now we let the customer control more of those performance aspects so they can go for trade-offs between power consumption and performance. This “lets the user setup the policy, we do those trade-offs across the stack.”
• After this panel, IBM Research’s Brenda Dietrich was a stand-in for the scheduled speaker who got caught in weather. It was a reprise of the talk she gave at Connect09 on analytics, which is one of the more accessible and well put together talks on what analytics actually is, requires, and what you can do with them. As she said, “advanced analytics used to be pointed mostly at long-term problems- we had no choice. Now we can apply them faster.”
• The last panel was a customer panel, packed with people speaking to how they were using IT as a core part of their business, as a way to not only meet the usual demands on IT, but provide new services to monetize. The panel was moderated by IBM’s Jim Corgel (GM, ISV and Developer Relations, SWG) and had: Scott Smith (eMeter), Mark Moore (S1 Corporation), David Fertig (The Systems House), Nishit Mehta (HyGen Pharmaceuticals), Michael Jacobs (FIS).
• Having worked in the online banking world long ago (back at FundsXpress), I was especially interested in what Mark Moore had to say. S1 is looking at helping banks deliver very customized, “tailored services” for retail banking customers. And, having the fine grained, custom pricing that goes along with them. And, the never ending need for better fraud detection.
• Apparently, FIS has recently decided to switch from System p to System z for what seemed like performance and data integrity reasons. As Michael said, there’s only so far they can go with parrell processing in banking where account clearing, for example, is a very linear task.
• On the topic of eMeters, Scott Smith said: mostly we have large scales of data going on here, and needs for regulation and control. “there are 130M electric meters in NA – 416M meters worldwide – these are about to be changed. Large market. Large data *. eMeter says petabytes of data for utilities are coming and unprecedented. *“

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

More details on what Smart Planet means for the Systems group at IBM.

Following this mornings general sessions, the afternoon brought more detail to the hardware meets Smart Planet vision-scape. There was more discussion of “growth markets,” a fun customer sit-down with Visa’s CTO Matt Quinlan, breakouts for the various server types, System Director talk, and then Q & A.

Here are some highlights:

• IBM says China continues to be a big, new market for them. They highlighted the big project types as: smarter rails, healthcare, banking modernization, Smart Grid. IBM’s Vinodh Swaminathan did the growth market presentation, and was interesting to note the lessening of the term “BRIC” and more emphasis on China, India, and Eastern Europe. ICEE, anyone?
• Tom Rosamilia, GM of System z (mainframes) hosted a “fireside chat” with Visa’s CTO Matt Quinlan. As customer talks go, this one was pretty good: it spoke both to technical details and the vision du jour, Smart Planet. As Matt summarized some Visa videos (making payments with a mobile phone and getting debit cards instead of checks for child support), these are “kind of our version in reality of Smart(er) Planet.”
• Visa has been running on mainframes for a long time, but updates to z/OS and other software throughout. To that end, when it comes to young talent, Matt said that they can get fresh college grades working on their mainframe based systems in two weeks.
• Matt on mobile & other new devices: the Visa plastic card has been around for 50 years. Even with a chip in the card, you can’t do much beyond the basics with it. With mobile phones you have a powerful chip, a computer in your pocket. “This is the first time in human history that we have truly a ubiquitous device…. What you can do with a transaction across a mobile platform is very different than what you can do with a point of sale.” Clearly, in being here Visa sees IBM as an important parter for that dry-cleaned cyberpunk vision.
• I chose to go to the System x breakout as most people I talk with are interested in x86, giving a confused look when it comes to Power and just laugh at me if I mention mainframes.
• The best, nuanced summary of the System x session was from Adalio Sanchez, GM of System z: “The hypervisor is not where the battle is going to be waged, it’s about how you bring it all together [into a system].” The idea here is that while x86 boxes may be built from commodity parts, there’s a certain type of embrace and extend IBM does to add extra value to how those “pizza boxes,” as Sanchez referred to them, are put together. That added value, along with a reasonably low price, is what would make IBM attractive vs., say, Dell.
• While it’s easy to make the Microsoft embrace and extend snark, he also clarified an anti-lock-in stance by dismissed unified computer entrants (Cisco) in the market by saying they’re “creating a proprietary approach that tends to lock people in. Integration is fundamental, but can be done in open ways that don’t create lock-in for the [customer].”
• The afternoon general session was started with STG Software GM Helen Armitage, who gave some more detail to STG’s software strategy. What’s interesting is that STG “owns” virtualization and operating systems (AIX, Linux, etc.) in IBM along with their own management stack, System Director. The goal of System Director is to provide base level, open integration and enough interfaces and UIs to use them without encroaching on Tivoli territory. While the virtualization and OSes are clear cut, things start to get fuzzy as you climb up to monitoring and other IT Management stacks. Clearly, Tivoli will do process and other ITSM tasks, but there’s enough overlap to be troubling, and many analysts said as much during the Q&A.
• There’s no easy, clear way to divide the world between System Director and Tivoli – STG can’t say it just instruments and makes monitoring possible in a “good enough” interface, and Tivoli can’t give up monitoring. Obviously, both do more than that simple distilling down, but in talking about the division of functionality, it’s difficult to get a “crisp” message. Then again, if one of them gave in on what they couldn’t do, it’d all add up. On the other hand, the metal to screen energy monitoring scenario from Pulse 2009 is a perfect example – and template – of how STG and Tivoli can share IT Management rather than throw dust up around the assumed clean separation of the two.
• As an overall note, it’s notable that the STG folks don’t speak to developers more. As Iwata commented on this morning, the new types of work loads (resulting in, requirements) that are driving new systems roll outs are not always ERP an classically enterprise software related. They’re new types of applications. Getting developers more intimate with hardware is a big challenge, as a whole generation of developers (myself included) were taught that working closing with the operating system, much less the hardware was a big no-no. Think the virtual machines of Java and the CLR of .Net. That kind of developer mentality favors commodity hardware, not the luxury toppings that come in IBM pizza boxes. However, there looks to be some developerWorks in the agenda for tomorrow, so we’ll see what Jim Corgel and crew suss out there.

In the evening we had dinner at the classicly country club feeling Winged Foot Golf Club, which was exactly what you’d expect from a golf club. Tomorrow has half a days activity and, tragically, a lab tour I’ll have to skip out on in favor of getting back to Austin.

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

Smart Planet goes whole-hog hardware at IBM’s Systems analyst summit.

I’m up here at the IBM TJ Watson Lab in Yorktown for the Systems and Technologies Group Analyst Summit (#STGEvent09 for short). This is the group in IBM that does servers and storage: the alphabet soup of hardware (p/i, x, and z), tapes, and storage arrays. The “technologies” part are things like retail point-of-sale, RFID (?), and other chunks of hardware.

Like all of IBM, the high-level focus in on Smart Planet and growth markets (or “emerging markets,” as we used to call them). STG’s mapping into the internet of things part of Smart Planet and the high performance transactions lurking in there fit well here: that whole “things” part is, of course, hardware and needs a lot of iron to run.

As with most analyst shows now, there’s good voyeuring in Twitter, here under the tag #STGEvent09.

Highlights

Here are some highlights of the morning, with light commentary:

• IBM’s Jon Iwata started off (after a brief opening from STG leader Rod Adkins) going over the success of the Smart Planet program. For this crowd, much of the thrust was in proving that Smart Planet isn’t just an ad campaign, but a technical strategy. After seeing two years of these talks and the cases around it, that seems fair. Though, as IBMers would tell you, there’s plenty of vision runway left to fill out.
• Iwata said they’d done a study of 20 customers using new technologies (like cloud-driven stuff and other Smart Planet categorized stuff). Shockingly for them, very few or none of them were dong traditional ERP projects. They were new types of projects. Instead, the projects were things like “farm-to-fork” tracking of chickens and the (now) classic cluster of Smart Planet cases, things like “Smart Sewage.”
• One of the interesting customers bases have been cities, under the (you guessed it) Smart City rubric. What was interesting here, Iwata said, is that cities as an “industry” will freely talk with each other and share best practices, etc. That won’t happen with banks, retail, and others where sharing IT best practices and projects screws with their competitive angles.
• Ginni Rometty, IBM’s SVP of Sales and Distribution, spoke about the types of customer problems this Smart Planet business applies to: lots of global financial system and supply chain butterfly effects, like rising gas prices causing rises in rice prices causing riots.
• Another good side comment of her’s was that analytics here are about predictive analytics, not looking at the past.
• Closing out the session before lunch, Rod Adkins got back up speaking to the STG portfolio and some (NDA) road-map info.
• The portfolio is an interesting mix of general purpose machines and customized machines (like CloudBurst). Across the board, the plan for appeal seemed was more about high functionality and the resulting value to hardware buyers vs. “good” enough, cheap boxes. Former STG’er Mark Cathcart (now at Dell) had some snark on the general vs. specialized topic.
• Additionally, as Gary MacFadden summarized, STG’s go-to-market is “focusd on workload optimization, solutions [think application-driven stacks, like data analytics and cloud], leverage new delivery models [cloud?], partner with SWG, Services.”
• During the Q&A, Judith Hurwitz asked if Adkins STG was looking at (in my words) self-service and provisioning technologies from the cloud world. The summary of the answer was pretty clear, if future looking: “yes we will look at those opportunities moving forward.” This squares with what Systems Software GM Helene Armitage said a few weeks back at Connect09.
• Over lunch, I talked with fellow analyst Charles King and Tivoli CTO David Lindquist about the evolving nature of image management, provisioning, and automation. We also discussed the US government’s ongoing and early interest in cloud computing, and how much room for “abstraction” there was on the table for applying cloud technologies to good old fashioned IT management. The thinking there being that much of the infrastructure out there is custom-fit to the applications and work-loads it runs on instead of being more generalized, leading to it being ready for private cloudesque ways of doing IT management.

The afternoon features a customer “fireside chat” with Visa CTO Matt Quinlan, breakouts for the different systems (p, x, and z), and more general session.

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