© 2003 International Business Machines Corporation. All rights reserved.
As part of IBM's company-wide e-business on demandTM initiative, Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger is responsible for helping customers transform themselves into on demand businesses and providing them with the technology, products and services necessary to help them take advantage of the Internet to reach that level.
In conjunction with this, Dr. Wladawsky-Berger leads IBM's participation in the movement toward open standards and open source software, like Linux, the company's Next Generation Internet efforts, and its Grid computing initiatives. IBM's Autonomic Computing efforts are also part of his e-business on demand work.
DB2DD: Thank you very much for talking with us. Your title is General Manager, e-business on demand. That sounds like a big job. Could you summarize your mission for us?
Wladawsky-Berger: My mission is a logical extension of the work I began back in 1996 when we established the Internet Division to make the Internet the unifying strategic focus of the IBM company. In the course of that, we developed the e-business model that has been increasingly adopted by businesses and other institutions around the world. And e-business on demand is the next evolutionary step for the Internet and e-business.
As the Net and e-business emerged a few years ago, customers began a process of adopting Internet standards and technologies. They began with simple access, publishing information on a Web site and often enabling customers to engage in simple transactions. Then e-businesses began to integrate their operations internally and externally using the Internet, so their employees could collaborate more closely and their business partners could be more supportive.
Of course, it's not as clear-cut as it sounds. Some customers began, for example, in the second stage. And other customers - granted a clear minority - are now in the third stage - the on demand stage. But actually all these stages represent points on the e-business continuum.
DB2DD: And what exactly is an on demand business?
Wladawsky-Berger: An on demand business is one that can respond with complete flexibility to changing market conditions, customer demand or external threat, in real time, as they are occurring, because all its business processes are thoroughly integrated.
It's a business that can focus totally on itself - its core competencies and what makes it stand out from its competitors - because it doesn't have to pay a lot of attention to its IT infrastructure. That's because the infrastructure exists in an on demand operating environment built on open standards. And with open standards like Web services and open Grid protocols, and with open middleware, you can attain unprecedented levels of business process and infrastructure integration. You can also virtualize everything so users don't have to deal with the complexity and can simply use the resource without having to care about how it works. And its those open standards that make the IT infrastructure more autonomic or self-managing so it's resilient and working day after day, around the clock.
An on demand business is a more efficient business because open standards allow it to optimize the installed base of technology. They also give customers unheard of flexibility in the ways they acquire and manage information technology - a flexibility that lets them strike the right balance in their cost structure between fixed capital investments and variable costs.
What on demand boils down to is a company that can not only survive, but win, in a dynamic, fluid marketplace.
DB2DD: You are involved with many projects, including Linux, Grid computing and autonomic computing. Is it a coincidence that those are some of the more prominent technologies in the IBM e-business on demand initiative?
Wladawsky-Berger: Not a coincidence at all. These technologies all embody open standards. Linux, for example - one of the more successful efforts of the open source movement - opens up new dimensions in application integration.
Grids built on the Open Grid Services Architecture let users share compute resources regardless of where they are. The result is that the use of all these expensive resources can be optimized so some systems aren't overburdened while others are idle. That's efficiency on an order we have never reached before. In addition open Grid protocols facilitate the utility model of computing which means that, if it observes the same standards as a service provider, the company can pay for compute resources on a usage basis and move to more of a variable cost model.
You can't be an on demand business without a resilient infrastructure. And a heterogeneous infrastructure can't be resilient unless it's autonomic, or self-managing. That is unless you're prepared to invest heavily in a labor-intensive environment; and even then I doubt you could attain the requisite level of resilience.
DB2DD: Some of these technologies, though, are quite "young," such as Grid computing and to some degree autonomic. Is it realistic to expect our customers to use these technologies?
Wladawsky-Berger: When is a technology old enough? Grid has been gestating in the research community - where the Internet came from - for some time now and commercial applications are beginning to accelerate. Autonomic functions are widespread in our server offerings as well as software like DB2® and Tivoli®. Web services is very real in the marketplace.
More and more, the marketplace is becoming an extension of the laboratory. After all, the Internet came out of the research community to be exploited by businesses of all sorts. Grid came out of the research community and is making it into the commercial sphere. More and more the distinction is blurring.
DB2DD: How does the strong emphasis on Linux play here? Why is IBM so strongly behind Linux as part of this strategy for now and the future?
Wladawsky-Berger: For one thing, Linux is more than just software - it is a movement, a culture. The result of this uniquely collaborative approach is a truly elegant piece of software that works on any type of computer hardware -- everything, from set top boxes to mainframes, and everything in between. In fact, one can say with confidence that it will even run on computer hardware that has not yet been invented. Customers in a heterogeneous environment thus get unprecedented flexibility and freedom of choice.
Linux is also just about the lowest-cost alternative on the market, which accounts for its growing appeal in the world of business and government. It is renowned for reliability and security; and, being a product of the open source community, has the largest pool of technical support anywhere in the industry - thousands of the brightest minds in the business.
Companies are embracing Linux on the mainframe because they can consolidate hundreds of distributed servers on one mainframe and save money. And simplifying the infrastructure by consolidating servers is the first step toward building an on demand systems environment.
DB2DD: You've talked about Linux, Web services, autonomic computing. IBM Data Management is a strong player in all those technology areas. Does that means there's a prominent role for data management in an e-business on demand world?
Wladawsky-Berger: Certainly, all our open middleware is crucial in integrating the on demand application environment, and data management is no exception. Data management fits very well in the on demand environment.
Remember, the on demand environment is integrated and DB2 has been a leader in information integration. Just look at the strides it's made in its ability to integrate data from anywhere on the Web using Web services technology. On demand is an open environment and DB2 has been an industry leader in open standards from J2EE to Web services.
Then there's virtualization: Virtualized computing means computing resources can be used as needed by those who need it, and DB2 scales and processes vast amounts of data on almost any platform. And of course its federation capabilities enable it to treat distributed backend data sources as if they were all part of the same environment - critical in a grid environment.
Finally, there's autonomic computing - the ability of the system or network to self-optimize; self configure, and to heal and protect itself. We believe DB2 is the database leader in self-optimization with its advanced query optimization capabilities, and we are still expanding its autonomic computing foundation with new capabilities. In fact, autonomic computing is a continuing focus of R&D for the data management team.
DB2DD: Thank you very much for your time. Any closing thoughts for our readers?
Wladawsky-Berger: I guess when I reflect on the Internet and e-business, I'm struck by the consistency of the evolution that began back seven or so years ago. I know, we had the dot-com fever but that was just the excitement that attends any new technology. (And come to think of it some of the dot-coms seem to be making it.)
But with the fever subsided, we are getting down to the real effort, integrating everything, building an on demand world in the marketplace and leveraging the Internet for real business value. That's the really tough job. But the companies that transform themselves into on demand businesses will be the winners. And so will those who help them.
All statements regarding IBM's future direction or intent are subject to change without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.
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