At its first Smarter Commerce Global Summit this week in San Diego, CA, IBM is announcing new software and services that address a broad spectrum of enterprise commerce activities — new ways to buy, sell and secure greater customer loyalty in the era of mobile and social networks
Here’s a simple picture story on the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of Smarter Commerce. Click on the image for a larger view:
See also:
How it Works: Smarter Commerce (an illustrated video)
Twenty years ago, Finnish graduate student Linus Torvalds launched a revolution–but he didn’t know he was doing so at the time. He posted a notice on a computing message board saying he was creating a kernel, or central utility, for a “free” computer operating system. He planned on using components from the GNU open-source software portfolio and using a popular open-source license called GPL, so people could freely use and contribute to the software. He named his operating system Linux and invited anybody who wished to contribute code. This was “just a hobby,” he wrote.
Today Linux is one of the most important pieces of software on the planet. It runs the computers for major Web sites including Facebook, Amazon.com and Google; powers 75% of the stock exchanges worldwide; and is a core technology in 95% of the world’s supercomputers. Linux runs in many mobile phones and is a core ingredient of cloud computing.
And Torvalds? He’s a fellow at the Linux Foundation, which is the organization that coordinates Linux development and promotion. He works at his home office in Portland, Oregon, presiding over the continuing development of the kernel. Torvalds agreed to answer a few questions by email about Linux and what he’s up to. He declined to address big open-ended questions, such as what Linux has accomplished. He leaves such judgments to others.
Question: On the 20th anniversary, how do you feel about Linux and your role in its development?.
Torvalds: I’m very happy with how things are going. Twenty years into it, it’s still interesting and it’s still challenging. And it’s different, and it’s never gotten to be some boring daily grind. And while my role in it has changed from being a core developer to be more of a manager (but without the logistical side to it. I don’t need to “take care” of people, only worry about the technical side), I still feel that I add value, so I’m happy.
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Here’s a video commemorating the anniversary from the Linux Foundation:
One of the vital lessons IBM learned from studying its 100-year history is that in order to survive for a long time organizations have to constantly transform themselves–and they must get out ahead of the changes that are coming rather than reacting defensively to them. There is no aspect of a business where this lesson is more important than in the IT department. Chief information officers earn their keep by managing their operations efficiently and effectively–making the trains run on time. But they’re even more valuable when they help create a commercial organism that’s capable of constantly renewing itself–a smarter enterprise. Then, they’re playing the role of a transformational CIO.
Jeanette Horan
Jeanette Horan, who became IBM’s CIO in May after 13 years with the company, is just settling into her new role, but already she has a clear vision of what she wants to accomplish. “The CIO truly sees the whole company,” she says. “We touch every process inside IBM. Also, we’re a showcase for IBM’s technologies. We walk the talk.”
She’s focused on three spheres: IT transformation, which is achieving improvements in IT operations through bold strokes; business transformation, which is improving the integration of IT with the business; and work transformation, which is all about revolutionizing the way employees are provisioned with technology. She’s aligned with the Smarter Planet principles, using new technologies that make it possible to better monitor business activities, manage the company’s vast portfolio of assets and bring analytics to bear to optimize operations.
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This is the first in a series of essays about The Payoff from Smart. The second and third installments will be published on July 22 and July 29.
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Steve Hamm in
Long the province of Internet startups and Wall Street outfits, cloud computing is at last going mainstream. That conclusion smacked me upside the head when I spoke to Jessica Carroll, managing director of IT at the United States Golf Association. “I see great opportunity in the cloud. We can run applications and do our backup without a huge capital outlay. We don’t have to buy servers of our own or train staff,” she said.
The USGA is golf’s governing body in the US and Mexico and conducts 13 national champions each year–including the US Open. It’s located in rural Far Hills, New Jersey, but it’s no technology backwater. Carroll is running several primary applications in the cloud and subscribes to a data backup service from IBM for all of her mission critical computing applications.
The reason I spoke to Carroll was that IBM on June 20 announced a pair of new cloud services, including virtualized server recovery and data archiving. IBM began developing its cloud services for backup and recovery several years ago, and engagements like the one with Carroll and the USGA helped the company hone its offerings.
Backup and recovery aren’t typically on the top of companies’ IT priority lists. They’re not exciting like new applications. “But I look at it as insurance,” Carroll told me. “Why wouldn’t you want to have coverage on your most important asset, which is your data?”
When you’re a company like IBM with the goal of changing the world, there are certain characteristics you have in terms of the ways in which everybody thinks, creates and works together.
And today, on this last day of IBM’s first century, tens of thousands of IBMers, retirees and partners are participating in a range of meaningful service projects in communities around the world.
This “Celebration of Service” builds on a tradition of volunteerism that is as old as the company itself, along with IBM’s flagship program for empowering volunteers — called On Demand Community. At any given time, there may be as many as 160,000 IBMers involved in community service efforts all over the map, sharing the same expertise and talent they provide to business clients to their schools and not-for-profits.
This is just one of several 100 Icons of Progress that show IBM’s collective brainpower at work — and how collaboration happens broadly and deeply.
Over the years, IBMers have built collaborate partnerships both intimate and vast in scope — from shoulder-to-shoulder collaboration with neighbors and communities, to Net-based breakthroughs that reach out to millions, leveraging the “wisdom of crowds” on a global scale. Continue Reading »
Posted by
Jack Mason in
UPDATE: You can now catch the replay of the webcast recorded live Wednesday, April 27, from 12:30 -1:30 EST.
Topic: Companies increasingly need to transform functions from operations to customer care via new digital techniques and technologies. But can they do this fast enough, and far enough, to keep pace with the growing power of their connected customers?
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Panelists:
- Ragna Bell - (moderator) IBM Institute for Business Value, Strategy & Transformation Leader
- Robin Carey – CEO, Social Media Today
- Saul Berman – IBM Global Business Services, Global Innovation & Growth Strategy Leader
- Andrew McAfee - a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management
- Paul Papas - IBM Global Business Services, Global Leader, Smarter Commerce
About the ibm Global Business Services vPanel Series: vPanels are webcam-based interactive webcasts to foster dialogue between thought leaders and viewers. Viewers can participate via the integrate chat to share their views and questions. Subscribe to the series to sample past discussions and to be alerted to new ones.
Download the complete IBM Institute for Business Value study (1.30MB)
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
When IBM’s Francesco Papetti traveled to Kenya to participate in the company’s Corporate Service Corps volunteer program, he made a side trip to Kimathi University College of Technology. There, using a Wii game controller and a handful of electronic components, he taught students how to build an inexpensive interactive white board.
Posted by
Chris Luongo in
Today information pours in faster than we can make sense it. It’s being authored by billions of people – and flowing from a trillion intelligent devices, sensors and all manner of instrumented objects. And with 80 percent of new data growth existing unstructured content – from music files to 3D images to medical records to email keystrokes — the challenge is trying to pull it all together and make sense of it.
But what if you could tap into this information to uncover lucrative business opportunities? What if you had the “inside information” you needed to retain customers or improve research? What if you could inject certainty and predictability into the decision-making process?
Participants at this week’s Information On Demand 2010 forum in Las Vegas are asking these questions, and they’re finding highly intelligent and profitable answers in clever analytics software that can organize, store and mine all of the information scattered throughout their organization and provide customized intelligence to gain faster insight from this information and help them work in a smarter way.
Click below for a larger version:
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
- Analytics
- Education
- Government Services
- Smart Grids
- Smart People
- Smarter Buildings
- Smarter Cities
- Smarter Communications
- Smarter Energy
- Smarter Healthcare
- Smarter Planet
- Smarter Public Safety
- Smarter Systems
- Smarter Traffic
- Smarter Transportation
- Smarter Utilities
- Smarter Water
- Smarter Water Management
- Smarter Work
- urban planning
Game fanatics have been enjoying simulation games ever since SimCity was first introduced in 1989, and electronic games are used for military and corporate training, but IBMer Phaedra Boinodiris designs so-called serious games to help people solve complex business and social problems.
Today, IBM is releasing her latest creation, CityOne, an on-line game that can help city leaders, businesses, and students figure out how to make cities work better by simulating transportation, environmental, business and logistical problems. The free game challenges players to complete missions involving energy, water, banking, and retailing. “It’s like an onion,” she says. “You can jump in and play it for 20 minutes, or you can stay and go deep and learn how cities are actually using different technologies.”
If Boinodiris doesn’t seem like a prototypical IBMer, it’s because she’s not. She was previously an entrepreneur and founder of two companies–one an Internet game portal and the other a game consulting company. Both her parents are IBM retirees, though.
Fittingly, it was a game of sorts that brought Boinodiris and IBM together. Three years ago, when she was studying for an MBA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she participated in a business case competition versus another university. The task, posed by IBM, was coming up with an innovative way to get business people interested in business-process management software. Her idea was to draw them in by designing an electronic game that would simulate how BPM software works in an imaginary business. One of her teammates was so sure that IBM would never accept a game as a solution that he up and quit the team on the spot. He was wrong. Sandy Carter, an IBM vice president in the software group who was one of the judges of the competition, liked the idea so much that she hired Boinodiris as an intern–with the task of designing the game she had proposed.
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Posted by
Steve Hamm in
- Analytics
- Government Services
- Green 500
- new intelligence
- Retail
- Smart banking
- Smart Grids
- Smarter Buildings
- Smarter Cities
- Smarter Communications
- Smarter Energy
- Smarter Enterprise
- Smarter Food
- Smarter Healthcare
- Smarter Planet
- Smarter Public Safety
- Smarter Systems
- Smarter Traffic
- Smarter Transportation
- Smarter Utilities
- Smarter Water
- Smarter Water Management
- Smarter Work
There’s no shortage of contests for tech startups in this world, but IBM’s SmartCamp is different. The focus is on companies that aim to make the world work better, and is aligned with our Smarter Planet agenda. We launched the program last year in Dublin and conducted regional contests this spring and summer in Stockholm, Boston, Tel Aviv, London, and Silicon Valley. (This video tells the Silicon Valley story.) There are still two contests left, in Paris on Sept. 24 and Copenhagen on Oct. 7, before the finals in Dublin on Nov. 16. So there’s time for entrepreneurs to get involved. Check it out at www.ibm.com/ie/smarterplanet/smartcamp.
