Magic at IBM Pulse… 2009

I have to say Tivoli did a bang up job at Pulse 09 its asset and service management event in Las Vegas, recently. The program was really solid. IBM Software Group’s narratives for vertical industries have rarely felt so crisp, and I have watched IBM for 14 years now.

As my colleague, sustainability point man for our GreenMonk advisory business, Tom Raftery, noted on his blog Tivoli smacked it out of the park when it comes to sustainability. There were very few conversations or presentations that didn’t have a green angle.

For example: Tivoli showed one of the slickest demos I have yet seen of how IT operations staffs could drill down on electricity consumption and correlate with other metrics to improve data center operations: IBM used the new toolset in its own Austin data center and discovered a strange anomaly- a noticeable power surge every night at 1am. Tivoli was able to ascertain the surge was a result of an antivirus scan running on every server at the same time. By staggering the times the spike was eliminated. Sustainability is just the latest ility IT has to manage, its a pivot point for service management decision-making. Note green is even becoming part of the ITIL service management language.

We were impressed enough by Chris O’Connor’s keynote to post it on the Greenmonk blog and now here too. The Austin antivirus story is at 13 mins and 45 seconds.

It was obviously particularly pleasing the Pulse agenda was so focused on Energy matters given Tom had travelled from Seville to be there. You want a decent Return on Carbon after all, when three RedMonkers travel to an event.

I want to wrap up with a metaphor that might be a little clumsy, but sums up some of my thinking about Pulse. The scheduled keynote for the last day was Michael Phelps, who got busted smoking a bong just a couple of weeks before Pulse. IBM did the right thing and stood by the Olympic champion, but for obvious reasons he decided to pull out. Who was the “replacement”?

Magic Johnson – a great American sportsman, and a great American entrepreneur. Seriously – if you don’t know about Johnson’s business career you’re missing out. Rap stars may get all the attention for their urban clothes businesses and vodka pimping contracts but Johnson is king of the black dollar (its like a green dollar but more stylish). He has an LA Starbucks that sells pound cake (Johnson is the only franchisee and makes more per customer than the parent company). He has some TGI Fridays that sells Crystal champagne. But real estate is the real game, Oh yeah- Johnson also supplies meat to companies across America. He is an awesome speaker because he has lived. Phelps has big lungs and big feet and swims fast. Magic has lived, and dealt with some adversity. People came out of the final keynote totally fired up. I was one of them. Legacy and experience are not always a bad thing. See Johnson, and indeed IBM…

disclosure: IBM is a client. Pulse was February 8th-12th but I only just got round to posting this.