Dinner At Crabtree’s Kittle House
I attended an IBM STG systems software group analyst summit in Somers last week. Our hosts took us out to Crabtree’s Kittle House for dinner – a favourite of Bill Clinton’s apparently.
Although he had no formal presentation in the conference itself, STG’s head Rod Adkins came and talked to us for half an hour in transit from one meeting to another. Those of us, like me, who have followed IBM servers for decades have know Rod for a long time and he’s brought a thorough understanding of IBM’s research and market capabilities to his role.
After thanking the analysts for their contributions to IBM’s success, Rod spoke about the attributes of Smarter Computing – a subject we’ve covered here. He also addressed STG’s priorities and talked a little about IBM’s competition. I thought it would be interesting for our readers to learn about his thoughts.
The Three Attributes Of Smarter Computing
Rod summarised the attributes of Smarter Computing as follows:
- Tuned For The Task – IBM has made deep investments in fitting workloads to systems, which we see as particularly strong in the transaction processing, retail and analytics areas; Rod talked about these systems as ‘tuned for the task’, which raised some interesting comments
- Designed For Data – also a major part of the systems software discussion, IBM sees itself as a player in the ‘Big Data’ area; in fact Rod suggested that Oracle’s Exadata is more old-fashioned because it’s wrapped around a traditional relational database; for IBM data efficiency is key, encompassing de-duplication, archiving, back-up and other areas; Rod pointed out that its Watson supercomputer had to answer Jeopardy! Questions in two and a quarter seconds – the first second to search 50 million lines of information, the second – to arrive at a statistical answer based on confidence levels and the last quarter of a second to respond; outside this illustrative model IBM is finding associated applications in Healthcare and Finance areas
- Managed Through The Cloud – a process Rod describes as systems ‘plumbed the right way’ incorporating simplification, provisioning and automation
We’ve been a bit critical about the choice of the ‘Smarter Computing’ name in the past, so it was fun to hear Rod talk about how they chose it; he raised a laugh by saying his engineering background had led to him to suggest ‘Hybrid Systems’ initially. They had also discussed using ‘Infrastructure’ and other words in their brainstorming. Read more »
