Wrapping up my week's coverage of the IBM Pulse 2011 conference, I have had several people ask me to explain IBM's latest initiative, Smarter Computing, which IBM launched this week at this conference. Having led the IT industry through the Centralized Computing era and the Distributed Computing era, IBM is now well-positioned to help companies, governments and non-profit organizations to enter the new Smarter Computing era, focused on insight and discovery.

Centralized Computing	Distributed Computing		Smarter Computing
Thousands of IT professionals Mainframe servers Effiicent, but only the largest companies and governments had them	Millions of office workers Personal computers (PC) Innovative, extending the reach to small and medium-sized businesses, but resulted in server sprawl and increased TCO		Billions of people Smart phones and other handheld devices Efficient and Innovative, combining the best of centralized and distributed computing
1952 to 1980	1981 to 2010		2011 and beyond

To help clients with this transition, IBM's Smarter Computing initiative has three main components. This is a corporate-wide strategy, with systems, software and services all working together to realize results.

Big Data

The first component is Big Data. This combines three different sources of data:

• Traditional structured data in OLTP databases and OLAP data warehouses, using data management solutions like DB2 and IBM Netezza.
• Unstructured data, including text documents, images, audio, and video, processed with massive parallelism using IBM BigInsights and Apache Hadoop.
• Real-Time Analytics Processing (RTAP) of incoming data, including video surveillance, social media, RFID chips, smart meters, and traffic control systems, processed with IBM InfoSphere Streams

Of course, Big Data will bring new opportunities on the storage front, which I will save for a future post!

Optimized Systems

Rather than general purpose IT equipment, we have now the scale and scope to specialize with systems optimized for particular workloads, the second component of the Smarter Computing initiative. Of course, IBM has been delivering integrated stacks of systems, software and services for decades now, but it is important to remind people of this, as IBM now has a spate of competitors all trying to follow IBM's lead in this arena.

As with Big Data, the focus on Optimized Systems has impacted IBM's strategy on storage as well. I'll save that discussion for a future post as well!

Cloud

I am glad that nearly all of the storage vendors have standardized to a common definition for Cloud, the third component of Smarter Computing, which shows that this concept has matured:

Cloud computing is a pay-per-use model for enabling network access to a pool of computing resources that can be provisioned and released rapidly with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
-- U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology [nist.gov]

Of course, Cloud is just an evolution of IBM's Service Bureau business of the 1960s and 1970s, renting out time-sharing on mainframe systems, Grid Computing of the 1980s, and Application Service Providers that popped up in the 1990s. While the [butchers, bakers and candlestick makers] that IBM competes against might focus their efforts on just private cloud or just public cloud, IBM recognizes the reality is that different clients will need different solutions. Rather than rip-and-replace, IBM will help clients transition to cloud via inclusive solutions that adopt a hybrid approach:

• Traditional enterprise with private cloud deployments, using solutions like IBM CloudBurst, SONAS and Information Archive
• Traditional enterprise with public cloud services to handle seasonable peaks, providing offsite resiliency, and solutions for a mobile workforce
• Hybrid clouds that blend private and public cloud services, to handle seasonal peak workloads, remote and branch offices

IBM's emphasis on IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), Tivoli and Maximo products will play well in this space to provide integrated service management across traditional and cloud deployments. This is why IBM decided to launch Smarter Computing initiative at Pulse 2011 conference, the industry's premiere conference on intergrated service management.

The IBM Watson that competed on Jeopardy! is an excellent example of all three components of Smarter Computing at work.

• IBM Watson was able to respond to Jeopardy! clues within three seconds, processing a combination of database searches with DB2 and text-mining analytics of unstructured data with IBM BigInsights.
• IBM Watson combined servers, software and storage into an integrated supercomputer that was optimized for one particular workload: playing Jeopardy!
• IBM Watson used many technologies prevalent in private and public cloud computing systems, storing its data on a modified version of SONAS for storage, using xCat administration tools, networking across 10GbE Ethernet, and massive parallel processing through lots of PowerVM guest images.

technorati tags: IBM, Pulse, ibmpulse, Centralized Computing, Distributed Computing, Smarter Computing, Big Data, Optimized Systems, Cloud Computing, SONAS, Netezza, DB2, InfoSphere, BigInsights, SPSS, Data Warehouse, Structured Data, Unstructured Data, Watson, CloudBurst, Information Archive