2015 and IBM i - It’s Closer Than You Think

I’ve talked frequently about the fact that the folks in IBM i development are working in the future. OK, we’re not literally “in the future” but we have to be writing code for releases that won’t be available right away, and we certainly have to be setting our strategy and plans for years to come.

While some of what drives the decisions is clear – competitive and industry trends for example – there are always confidential business directions that influence our plans as well. People in IBM at very high levels set strategies and goals, and much of the time, we don’t get to talk about those goals.

But then, there are exceptions.

  In May of 2010, IBM’s CEO, Sam Palmisano talked to investors, in a public venue, and made one of IBM’s goals clear – earnings of $20/share by 2015. It was widely reported by industry magazines and sites, and has been discussed by bloggers and other folks interested in the IT industry and investing. The same goal has been reiterated lately, and again, widely reported.

 

When your boss makes a statement like that, you can bet that your plans had better help support that goal. There are many, many parts of IBM, each of which is expected to contribute its portion of revenue to meet that goal, and IBM i will continue to do its part by remaining an integrated platform with world-class security and low total cost of ownership and acquisition, while growing in the areas that help our customers advance their businesses and our partners grow their solutions. We’re heavily involved in the development of the next major release, the Technology Refreshes and other deliverables that will come out before then, and architecture and planning work for capabilities beyond that. If you remember my post from May, the direction we have set for IBM i in 2011 through 2013 is coordinated with doing our part.

When our CEO talks to investors, clearly he has a financial message to give. But underlying that message is the method – the roadmap – for reaching the goal. And that roadmap is based on understanding where the world is going to have needs in 2015 – it’s a reason for the “Smarter Planet” message. So IBM will spend its time and apply its resources, including those of the IBM i team, to meet those needs.

I’ve seen some of what is coming to get us to 2015. It’s pretty cool. Stay tuned.

 

Twitter: #ibmi @Steve_Will_IBMi 

 

Advisory Councils – Requirements and Strategy

I’ve been a bit silent on this blog for a while. Why? Conferences and Advisory Councils. (And a toothache, but let’s leave that out of the discussion for now…)

In the span of six weeks, I will have had the following opportunities to talk with, and present to, many parts of the IBM i community:

• April 29-30: COMMON Americas Advisory Council (CAAC)
• May  –4: COMMON Conference
• May 17–18: IBM i ISV Advisory Council (ISVAC)
• May 22–24: COMMON Europe
• May 25-26: COMMON Europe Advisory Council (CEAC)
• June 5–10: IBM i Large User Group

Yes, this has been “conference season.” I've had a chance to give presentations on the latest releases of IBM i, on the reasons IBM i is unique in the IT industry, on the future of IBM i, and on the Software as a Service and Cloud capabilities of IBM i. Equally importantly, I've had the chance to talk about future requirements and potential strategy with several user groups.

I can’t stress enough how important submitting requirements through these user groups can be. We listen carefully to the kinds of enhancements our customers and ISVs want, and many times it's the passionate explanation of business opportunity from these groups that help us justify new investments.

In addition to requirements, though, I solicit input from these Advisory Councils on potential new strategies. Because the ideas are “potential” they don’t always come to fruition, but getting input helps us make the decisions and often allows us to make modifications before we actually implement those that do make it to the market.

An example of this sort of strategic input, which we can talk about now that we have delivered it, is the Technology Refresh (TR) concept. We exposed the idea to our Advisory Councils about 18-24 months before we shipped the 7.1 release, which was six months before the first TR. We took input, made some changes, and the entire deliverable was better for it.

At the most recent set of Advisory Councils, I've been asking for input on several other new concepts. Some may not happen – in fact, based on the feedback from CAAC and CEAC, I’m sure one will not. Some will eventually appear, but will take a while and will likely evolve, but getting feedback now is important.

I’ll be back soon with some good stories about Innovation Award winners and how they are using IBM i.

 

Twitter: #ibmi @Steve_Will_IBMi #COMMONUG

 

IBM Watson’s Storage Requirements

In my last blog entry, I briefly mentioned a project called “Watson.” Watson is a set of IBM Research technology, running on POWER technology, which will compete in the “Jeapordy!” game against two of that game show’s most celebrated champions. Since my blog, a number of good articles have been written about it, including an excellent overview in Jon & Susan’s blog. If you're not familiar with Watson’s basics, you should probably start there, and then come back here. 

Don’t worry.  I’ll wait.

OK, now that you have the overview, I thought I’d point out one of the technical details of the project, and then discuss implications of such technology on computing in general.

Watson’s cluster of POWER 750s is using two 2 terabyte (TB) I/O nodes, for a total data repository of 4 TB. How impressive does that sound to you? In one sense, that amount of data can sound rather large.  Many businesses do not have 4 TB of data. On the other hand, to compete in a general knowledge quiz show, is that enough? Well, a rule of thumb I once learned is that 1 Terabyte was about as much text information as is contained in 20 volumes from a printed encyclopedia. Now, the encyclopedia I bought more than 20 years ago had 24 volumes, and it added a new volume every year to cover events which happened in that year. So, by that analogy, 4 TB might be enough room to have a full encyclopedia’s worth of general knowledge at your fingertips (or, at the ends of your disk-arms, for Watson) as well as another 16 year’s worth of more specific information.

Somehow, while that sounds like a lot of data, it might still be less data than I think Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter have in their heads. They are veritable founts of knowledge.

And yet, if you listen to this Why Data Matters video on the IBM Watson site, 4 TB is still miniscule, compared to the amount of data being produced. The estimate given in those videos is 15 Petabytes of new data is generated throughout the world each day. That’s right, the new data each day is 4,000 times larger than could be stored in Watson for this challenge. But, for the challenge, the data is specific to a purpose, and that purpose is quite impressive – competing with human beings in knowledge-based answering.

By the way, one implication of this information is that Watson is only using data that's stored in its disks. Watson is not connected to the Internet, or any network outside of the clustering network that connects its 750s and its storage. So, don’t assume that Watson is getting some advantage, such as having access to search engines.

This is going to be very important as the DeepQA technology gets applied to real-world applications.  Suppose, for example, you wanted to ask a computer about a fairly complex topic – taxes, for example – and you wanted to get a reasonably reliable answer. The Federal Tax code is pretty complex, but it could be contained on a single set of servers and storage, and you would want your answers to be consistent with the information in those servers. You most certainly would not want to have the QA system pulling data in from blogs on the Internet, written by people who are misinformed about the reality of tax laws.

For many of us in this industry, Watson represents another step toward the kinds of computers we saw on Star Trek. Computers that can understand our meaning, even if we ask a question in a strange way, to turn a question into a query, will make computers more usable in ways we have only dreamed before. Computers that have access to all of the pertinent information and know how to search it will provide extensions to our knowledge which approach artificial intelligence. Computers that not only can give us an answer but can also give an estimate of confidence in that answer will help us make decisions in more informed ways.

 

#ibmwatson

 

 

Planning for 2011 – The Life of an IBM i Architect 4Q10 Edition

Back in March, I discussed one of the two major cycles of the year here in IBM -- the Spring Strategy. Over the past several weeks, we have been working non-stop on the second major cycle, the Fall Plan.

It probably comes as no surprise to many of you that a planning cycle takes place here in the latter part of each year. Some of you, members of our various advisory committees for example, know we get your input in preparation for this work. But even if you don’t work directly with IBM setting priorities for our plan, your business probably does something very similar. It’s quite common that an enterprise is trying to set its budget for the next calendar year during the fall.

This is by far the busiest time of year to be an architect. We have had so many requests come in from customers that there is many times as much work to do as we could ever get done. Additionally, the strategy work we did earlier in the year pointed to trends in the industry that we evaluated for their potential to affect our customers over the next few years, and we must prepare for some of them. And then there are the future capabilities of various I/O devices and processor technologies that must be considered and implemented.

Then we must evaluate all of those potential changes against the constraints we have. Again, this is the same as with any business doing its plan. What will satisfy our customers most? What will create value that will drive revenue? How many developers can we afford to put on our projects? Do we need to grow skills in some new technologies? Do we need to partner with others? Are dependencies on other projects still in place, or must they be modified?

With all of this planning going on, I’m afraid I have gotten behind in my blogging. So if you look forward to getting news and views from me -- well, thank you, and I’m sorry I’m not able to write quite as frequently. I’m also working to get some guest bloggers between now and the end of the year to cover some topics readers have requested, such as more details on storage options, and I suspect that our upcoming meeting with the COMMON Americas Advisory Council will also provide inspiration for blogging as well.

Until next time, we will keep planning for you and i.

You and i Are Not Alone

Though many of us personally like to feel that we are individuals, that we don’t follow the crowd just to follow the crowd, the same does not seem to hold for businesses. Businesses seem to like to know that they’re not alone. Businesses want reassurance that, while they try to be unique – or at least better than their competition – in some real way, they’re still doing things the way others do them.

This shouldn’t surprise any of us who work for businesses. Our executives, our technologists, are constantly looking around to see what other companies are doing, to see if those others have found something that brings a competitive advantage. But they also look around for other companies that are doing the same things they themselves are doing, to provide some reassurance that the choices they’re making are not out of step with the mainstream.

Consequently, one of the frustrations in the computer industry, and certainly in the IBM i customer community, is a lack of visibility to other customers who are using the same technology – IBM i in this case. I can tell you, factually, that IBM i has more customers than any other IBM platform, that we still have easily over 100,000 enterprises of one size or another actively using IBM i and its immediate predecessors, that we’re still sold and have active customers in more than 115 countries in the world. I can tell you these things, but if your company doesn’t know other companies using IBM i, you might still feel alone.

As you might imagine, we at IBM don’t have the right to just tell everyone the names of our customers. To help with that barrier, some of our customers, such as those in the iManifest groups, have voluntarily advertised their use and happiness with the IBM i platform.

Infor recently held an IBM i user conference in Phoenix, Arizona, and the temperature wasn't the only thing that was hot. Infor demonstrated their dedication and commitment to their IBM i clients with new product announcements and exciting future plans. Guy Paradise from our team delivered a keynote presentation on Power Systems and IBM i directions. This was a high-energy event and it was great to see hundreds of dedicated clients all moving their businesses forward on IBM i and Infor solutions. Infor's announcement of next year's conference in Las Vegas was met with enthusiastic applause and is sure to once again be hot, hot, hot. At these kinds of events, the companies that attend can clearly see others that are using IBM i. That’s one reason why COMMON and other customer groups around the world are so great.

In this blog, I am going to start telling you about customers I meet or events we’ve recently held with customers who are actively using IBM i, as long as they allow me to use their company information. I’ll have another event to discuss next week, but I got to wondering if maybe we could use some social media to help IBM i people realize they are not alone. Here’s what I am thinking.

I am on Twitter these days. I know, some people hate the idea of Twitter, some love it, and most people still can’t quite figure out what its real value is. But hear me out.

What if every business that’s using IBM i created an account on Twitter, or asked one of their employees who has an account to use it, and then each of these companies tweeted a simple message:

#ibmiuser <Company Name> <Link to Company Website>

In Twitter, that “#” (called the “pound,” “number sign,” “cross-hatch,” or “tic-tac-toe thingy” – it’s a technical term) – that “#” indicates that a searchable Twitter tag follows. If you want to go find the tweets that have anything to do with IBM i, you can go search for #ibmi and you will see them. So, if we had companies go tweet #ibmiuser <Company Name> <Link to Company Website>  they would be doing two things: advertising their company, and stating that they use IBM i (or i5/OS if they’re still on V5R3 or V5R4). And then people who wanted to know the kinds of companies using IBM i could just go to Twitter and search #ibmiuser.

This blog gets read by many hundreds of people a week. If each of them tweeted #ibmiuser, that would be a start. It’s still not 100,000, but perhaps the people who read this can tell their friends about it. More precisely, if business partners and ISVs asked their clients to do it, then we’d get an even bigger base. Ultimately, if the IBM i user community were able to see that others are using IBM i as well, then they would realize the truth that’s out there: we are not alone. (OK, did anyone else just think about the poster in Fox Mulder’s office? Sorry. Geeky TV reference there.)

You and i are not alone. I know this to my core because I get to deal with so many customers as I do my job. Here’s hoping that those of you who are actively and happily using IBM i can find each other and realize just how many ways IBM i is being used.