Following is a guest post from Rick Singer, IBM vice president of client experience, which includes our work with major sports properties:
Here’s a frustrating scenario for a sports fan at any kind of tournament: you’re outside the stadium and hear a cheer break out, but don’t know what action just happened on the court. At this year’s U.S. Open Tennis Tournament, all you have to do is take out your iPhone and use the IBM “Around Me” application to point your phone at the stadium and “see through the walls” to get up to speed on the score and match statistics.
Around Me is an augmented reality application, developed by IBM, for iPhone users at this year’s US Open that allows fans to get a glimpse of what’s happening on the court and also to find the closest restroom, first-aid stand and pizza vendor in the food-court. Now when you take a quick break to get one of those giant tennis balls at the Chase booth, or need a hot dog, not all is lost (in fact, Around Me could’ve found you that hot dog). It works by blending the iPhone’s camera functionality with the global positioning system (GPS) that is embedded in the tennis fan’s iPhone. All of this is supported by a smart infrastructure of IBM technology at the Open and backed up by our data centers. See here for a video that shows how IBM mobile technology is making the U.S. Open smarter:
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Of course, augmented reality and geo-location are great for enhancing the tennis experience for fans at the Open, but what’s also interesting is the implication for future innovation in mobile technology that goes beyond sports. IBM researchers are developing applications for mobile computing that span industries and solutions like Smarter Healthcare, Smarter Retail and Smarter Finance.
In healthcare, IBM is developing methods to transmit a patient’s vital signs from a mobile device back to a central location running analytics to evaluate and predict things like heart attacks. This kind of mobile web technology could actually save lives. Routine healthcare visits might also be done remotely in the future through sensor technology transmitted by mobile devices – these types of systems could even allow for more current and accurate patient records than what we have today.
In retail, IBM is looking at ways that vendors might leverage data from telecom providers to capture customer information and better reach potential clients. With data about what a consumer has recently purchased, who their social networks are and their current location, a retailer might be able to know, for instance, that a consumer likes golf clubs, has friends who like them too, leaves work in midtown at 6:30pm and passes by the sports store on his way home. In this way, retailers can target the right consumers in the right places at the right times through mobile tracking and mobile advertising.
In finance, IBM is evaluating the types of payment systems that will exist in the future. For example, with digital wallet technology for mobile devices, the role of banks will shift within a new ecosystem. By combining the data analytics that banking institutions will be able to utilize, along with mobile advertising for retail and GPS tracking capabilities, IBM sees the dynamics radically shifting in the future.
Today, we’re making a Smarter U.S. Open with mobile web technology… tomorrow, we could be making people’s lives better and helping to spur new business opportunities.
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Karl Roche in
Today we open the doors for 9 days at the IBM Summit at Start, just as a YouGov poll of over 2,000 consumers revealed that 47 per cent of British adults feel the plethora of information on sustainability is confusing and often conflicting.
The business community didn’t fair much better as 50 per cent of the public rate the way organisations convey their sustainability policies as ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’. How can we change that?
May be changing that perception over the 9 days of IBM Summit at Start is asking a lot but we can begin to get things rolling. The key to the event is asking, what can sustainability do for business? This is a more authentic way to approach the subject so as to arrive at a place where the output makes sense to business and it’s consumers.
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Steve Hamm in
Intel’s purchase yesterday of security software maker McAfee, detailed in this News.com story, signals a shift in the tech industry’s view of how to better secure computers, networks, and software programs: Security has to be built in, rather than added on later. It’s the concept of “secure by design.”
At IBM, the secure-by-design concept extends to encompass our Smarter Planet agenda. These days, its not enough to secure the traditional computing infrastructure. You’ve got to protect all of the devices and networks that are now being used to monitor, manage, and analyze everything from smart electrical grids to health care systems. “All of the physical assets of the world are becoming digitized, instrumented, interconnected and intelligent,” says Kristin Lovejoy, head of IBM security strategy. “But the sad reality is that as people develop and design these new technologies they’re not thinking enough about the issue of security. These devices are so critical that if they’re unavailable or if they’re tampered with, it could have a significant negative impact on an individual or a large population.”
When security is an afterthought, it tends to be expensive and not that effective. Plus, organizations typically find out about a vulnerability after it has already been exploited by malicious software programs.
We believe that only by designing products to be secure can organizations gain the protection they need at a reasonable price. With that principle in mind, IBM has established what we call a secure engineering framework. It’s a set of specifications that we are beginning to use in all of our design processes, for hardware and software alike.
Now that the world’s critical infrastructure is being wired and networked, security is becoming more important than ever before. Business-as-usual in the tech industry isn’t good enough any more.
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Steve Hamm in
Source: Wikimedia Commons
In Namibia, they have a completely different understanding of the phenomenon of “mobile banking” than we do in the United States. For the past two years, the First National Bank of Namibia has been dispatching small trucks–really, banks on wheels–to make the rounds of far-flung settlements in the vast Kalahari Desert, in southeastern Africa. The vans are equipped with computers and connected to the bank’s network via a satellite data communications hookup. It’s the old bookmobile idea transplanted to Africa and banking.
This intriguing bit of news comes from Stephen Lloyd van Rhyn, the bank’s head of information technology, who late last year installed an IBM mainframe at the bank’s headquarters. van Rhyn spoke at yesterday’s launch of the zEnterprise mainframe in New York City. Thanks to the reliability of the computer, he said, “we can set up accounts for bushmen in the Kalahari.”
- Source: Wikimedia Commons
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Steve Hamm in
Credit: Luca Galuzzi Wikimedia Commons
One of the notable messages to come from IBM’s quarterly earnings report today was the strength of demand for technology in developing markets. Revenues in our growth markets represented 20% of overall revenues and they’re growing faster–expanding by 14% compared to 2% for overall revenues.
While the lion’s share of the demand comes from large, fast-growing economies such as China, India, and Brazil, the entire developing world is starting to take advantage of the transformative potential of information technology. Africa, too.
Consider Namibia. Late last year, the First National Bank of Namibia bought and installed an IBM mainframe computer. That may sound like overkill until you realize why the bank went that route and what it plans to do with the big machine.
Namibia is a desert country in southeastern Africa, with a population of just 2 million. Previously, the bank, which is the largest in the country, had its computing done by its parent company in neighboring South Africa. But that caused problems: outages and latency. So the bank decided to buy its own machine to better serve its network of 50 branches and 200 ATMs. “You’re in a developing nation, so your infrastructure isn’t as sound as elsewhere, but you still want to provide superior service to your clients,” says Stephen Lloyd van Rhyn, the bank’s Head of Information Technology. He says the mainframe has done the trick: “It’s super reliable, like the old diesel engines. It just runs and runs. And it’s energy-efficient, too.”
So far, van Rhyn says, the bank is only using about 10% of the capacity of the mainframe, but that’s going to change. He’s gradually moving additional computing applications to the machine, with the goal, potentially, of achieving a bank in a box. At the same time, the parent company, First Rand Ltd., is expanding in neighboring countries. Currently, they have operations in Botswana, Zambia, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Mozambique. They’re considering using the mainframe in Namibia to support the expansion strategy.
What FNB is doing illustrates the potential for bringing advanced computing capabilities to places that have very little now. Some of southern Africa’s economies are perking up, and computing can help sustain and even accelerate that momentum. The goal: A smarter Africa.
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Steve Hamm in
W. Brian Arthur explains agent-based modeling.
What if legislators could foresee how people might find loopholes in the bills they’re working on–and head it off? That was one of the themes in a fascinating presentation made by the Santa Fe Institute’s W. Brian Arthur at IBM’s Smarter Health Through Modeling and Simulation conference last week in San Jose, Calif.
Arthur, an external professor at the institute, which focuses on the study of complex systems, said that by using agent-based modeling, researchers could have been able to identify some of the unintended consequences of the partial repeal in 1999 of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had prohibited bank holding companies, whose accounts are insured by the federal government, from owning securities businesses. Some economists have blamed the repeal of the act for worsening the effects of the global financial crisis.
The techniques could have headed off some of the problems that arose with Massachusetts’ health care reforms, as well. One of the problems with the the Massachusetts system, he said, is that too many people signed up for health insurance only when they anticipated they would need it in the not-too-distant future, so they took benefits from the system but didn’t contribute their fair share to the insurance pool. Arthur said agent-based models could have spotted this loophole ahead of time and allowed legislators or the insurance industry to put in place rules that could close it.
In this video clip, Arthur explains the magic of agent-based modeling.
I recently moderated a panel at a private event we hosted in London and the biggest takeaway for me: the speakers seemed to have accepted the fact that things can not go back to the way they were. Reform – for better, or for worse – is in the air.
The event was focused on ‘Smarter Banking’ and we had two industry luminaries – Lindsay Tomlinson (former BGI CEO, currently BlackRock Managing Director) and Bill Winters (former co-CEO of JP Morgan Investment Bank) debate the future of the industry. Several themes emerged from this debate:
- The purpose of the industry: The government and the industry have yet to define the industry’s purpose, its raison d’etre – and as a result there are many different opinions on what the new era will look like
- Shrinking industry returns (for now): The expectation is around 10-11% (down from around 25-30%)
- A need for more trust: There is a “crisis of legitimacy” – the industry has historically managed its own interests versus those of its clients – this will be reversed going forward
- Compensation fixation: It will come down, but only to a point – even in the Bible, people griped about how much money lenders were paid
- Role of government: Governments need both strategic vision and purpose otherwise they’ll go too far – it’s not about new rules it’s about new behavior
My biggest question going into the session was which ‘stage of grief’ is the industry currently in. Our research plots the stages that firms in the mature* markets are currently going through:
- Denial (this isn’t happening to me!)
- Anger (why is this happening to me?)
- Bargaining (I promise I’ll be a better person if…)
- Depression (I don’t care anymore)
- Acceptance (I’m ready for whatever comes)
When we asked participants ‘what keeps you awake at night’ 85% stated business model uncertainty. As the industry moves through the stages from denial to acceptance, the industry must solve its business model identity crisis. Although there seems to be a nearly universal nostalgia for the past, 90% of executives agree that both the past – and the returns that come along with it – are over (at least for now until we do it all over again).
While the debate is far from over, we will continue to explore these themes with our clients and partners as we determine what we should research next.
What are your views on the future of the industry – has the industry really accepted the new normal or is it still in denial?
*Note that the most often cited quote from our interviews in the developing economies goes something like this: “I’m not so sure they’re mature. In my opinion we’re all developing economies and we’re all just starting or starting over.”
Editor’s note: In this blog’s focus on building a smarter planet, we put a lot of “ink” about macro industry issues. We also want to help readers understand that beneath all of this is a critical technology infrastructure. To that end, we asked IBM’s Bernie Spang to contribute his perspective on the topic while he is attending the “Smarter Systems for a Smarter Planet” event in IBM’s Almaden Research Labs. Following is his blog post:
There is an increasing sense of urgency we hear from clients who want to get more value from their IT systems. More value in two dimensions – greater value from the information they manage and greater efficiency of the systems themselves.
They have surely obtained value from the investments they’ve made in managing information to execute business processes. But they don’t feel as if they have a consistent view of all their information and enough visibility into the current state and changing conditions of their organization and the markets they serve. They believe that they can better use computing systems to analyze their information to discover hidden insights. Insights that can help them optimize the way their business operates, to optimize the way they interact with their customers and to find new opportunities that they couldn’t see before.
With greater analysis of existing information, they could better serve their citizens or patients, or gain competitive advantage and sell more products and services. This is propelling businesses around the world to not just continue to invest in analytic-based solutions but to increase their investment.
But how does an organization increase such investment at a time when most budgets are at best flat? And when the majority of those budgets go to maintaining existing systems with the capacity needed to support business as usual growth?
That is where the value of greater efficiency comes in. And why IBM is accelerating delivery of systems that are optimized for specific application workloads. Systems that are the right size and balance of finely tuned resources and easily expanded as needs of the business dictate. A new generation of software, servers and storage technology has opened the way for much greater efficiency. Freeing clients to shift investment from maintaining to excelling.
IBM Systems z clients have known for years that running multiple workloads on a single system, each running in its own virtual image, maximizes system utilization and delivers the lowest cost of computing per application user. Innovations such as POWER7 processors, eX5 systems and DB2 pureScale have opened the door to using this “virtual scale-out” approach to dramatically increase the efficiency of Unix and x86-Linux computing environments.
At today’s Smarter Systems for a Smarter Planet event at the Almaden Research Center, IBM client AfriSam and business partner Synopsis shared how they are optimizing IT to improve business results.
AfriSam is the #1 building supply business in South Africa. They play an active role in building the core infrastructure such as airports, roads and harbors. AfriSam’s CIO shared how they recently moved their SAP environment from an Oracle Database running on HP Servers to an optimized IBM Power and DB2 system in one weekend, and have been able to reduce storage space by approximately 35 percent. This has translated into significant cost savings.
Latin American-based business partner Synopsis recently worked with Banco de Credito del Peru to move its banking application, Credipago over to an IBM optimized system in just a matter of days. The banking system is now running IBM DB2 software on Power System that is performing transactions 30 percent more efficiently and had reduced ongoing software costs. The bank is able to shift investment to analyzing information to gain new insights regarding trends in customer services to better serve their clients.
These are just two of the many stories I have heard recently from clients and partners that all echo the same theme. Around the world and in all industries the top priorities are driving down cost though more efficient systems, and accelerating growth by investing in analytic systems to uncover new insights. And that in a nutshell is what we mean by Smarter Systems for a Smarter Planet.
Bernie Spang is the director of product strategy in IBM’s Software Group.
Posted by
George Faulkner in
As you may have noticed from the last post, IBM’s Sam Palmisano visited the Chatham House stage in London today having delivered a speech titled ‘Welcome to the Decade of Smart.’ Throughout tonight (and over the coming days) we will be posting content and links to images and video from the event here, as they become available.
From the post-event materials being distributed:
On January 12, 2010, Samuel J. Palmisano, IBM Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officers, addressed business and civic leaders at Chatham House in London. In his remarks, he described how forward-thinking leaders in business, government and civil society around the world are capturing the potential of smarter systems to achieve economic growth, near-term efficiency, sustainable development and societal progress.
Links:
Launch a video of the speech: Sam Palmisano at Chatham House
Launch a video of the Q&A from Chatham House: Q&A from Chatham House
Today, Steve Lohr of the New York Times published a brief article about the speech that takes a look at the past year of Smarter Planet work from IBM.
Paul Glader of the Wall Street Journal published an article today as well that examines aspects of IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative.
