You know a smart business when you see one. It's the retailer you turn to first because the merchandise is always original and available. The medical center that coordinates your health records across 22 facilities. The power company that lets you set your own usage by appliance.
Our planet is getting smarter
These advances are possible because digital intelligence can be infused into almost any object, process or natural system that makes up the way our world works. IBM is working with visionary organizations to use this intelligence to do almost everythingfrom traffic flows to electric power to food supply chainsmore effectively.
While select systems are becoming smarter, the vast majority of the world's IT infrastructuremobile devices, PCs, servers, data centers, software and the processes that make it all workremain slow, inefficient and incapable of the work ahead. But there are new computing capabilities that can literally "reinvent" existing IT properties, making them leaner, flexible, resilient and smarter.
SOA (US)
Often, the first step to an agile organization starts with connecting your applications in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Yansha (US), a Chinese retailer, implemented the first SOA-based supply chain, reducing order lead time from 2.5 days to 4.5 hours.
Virtualization (US)
Virtualization can dramatically improve server utilization. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (US) is transforming its systems through consolidation, standardization and virtualization. This has resulted in a 150% increase in processing capacity.
Service Management (US)
Control all of your IT assets from one point, gain greater visibility into your system as a whole and grant your users control. It's possible... with service management.
Security (US)
A smart infrastructure assumes security capabilities that are integrated across the organization, yet specialized enough to address myriad threats.
New Enterprise Data Center (PDF, 2.02MB)
The heart of any infrastructure is the data center. IBM's New Enterprise Data Center combines virtualization, energy efficiency and security capabilities.
Green technologies (US)
With energy costs eating up 30-40% of the IT operations budget, green technologies are critical to any smart infrastructure strategy.
