It is clear that Steve Mills has taken a page from Steve Jobs book and is trying to change the culture of IBM. He said in a speech recently that Jobs had not new technology, only the ability to deliver what customers really want. While IBM has always had a strong customer focus, this comment takes the company to a new level of customer focus for IBM. So this is a journey for IBM and the people are capable of making that shift, but do not have any idea of how to do it. It seems to me that as IBM positions to achieve technology evolutions that are adapted to the market demands of customers.
IBM made the announcement of Pure Systems product line emphasizing the value for customers. IBM has looked at understanding what is driving customer cost and how to get cost out of server implementations. Capacity is the issues, the overall cost of compute capacity is the issue. The cost to run the operations, configuration, loading new software represents manual activity that represents labor intensive tasks, so the IBM technology is being applied to developing less labor for processing.
Set up, operational configuration, reconfiguration are being redone to provide automation at every step of the way. Labor saving systems are reducing customer spends.
The labor to run and operate systems is implemented with the moniker Pure Systems. This brings better configuration, true automation of the server, storage, and networking. It gives the ability to discover systems resources and use them efficiently in an automated manner. At the server level IBM is providing plug and play, labor savings achieved with pre-configuration. It literally takes less than 4 hours to get a server into production, reducing complexity, masking complexity, providing management of the systems from a single pane of glass.
IBM cannot take complexity out of the systems, but they call it cockpit awareness, reducing complexity to a level, hiding complexity to a level where someone can manage automatically. The ability of the customer to work with IBM depends on a tool set used to customize to their configuration.
IBM calls this following patterns. There is a pattern used to auto provision the units within the data center, server, applications, storage, database, and systems. IBM has achieved a break through in cost management and systems automation based on customer needs.
Improving the labor side depends on the ability to offer flexibility. A set of patterns have been developed around configuration. Simplifying patterns is the aim. Customers want to be able to take a server out of box and use it without a lot of associated expense. The aim of IBM has been to adapt servers to deliver lower costs of operations. Servers are pre-configured with automated discovery, automated configuration, and patterns of typical use. The aim is to develop a pattern and repeat it. IBM has been giving its customers a tool to make mass customization within highly configured system possible.
In this regard, Steve Mills is talking about delivering rapid time to value. IBM is seeking to deliver a complete system. It is seeking to deliver hardware and software together. It is seeking to deliver more margin for partners and to give customers greater value. Analytics and big data are a priority, sales force productivity is achieved from realizing greater value from selling process. IBM offers tools to improve the sales force. The aim is to effectively manage the sales force. IBM offers a visualization tool set that lets customers surface patterns within the data.