IBM Pulse Day 1 - Mobile, Cloud and Big Data – Are You Ready?At the Monday morning Pulse general session there was a lot of talk about the coming convergence of three major technologies:
First let’s look at mobile, according to Google 1 million new Android devices are provisioned daily. Let that sink in for a moment, 1 million is a daily figure not monthly. There are now more smart phones on the planet than people. These are the kind of statistics that drive transformation across industries and is the reason for IBM’s MobileFirst launch at Mobile World Congress at the end of February. As mobile devices and applications continue their explosive growth they are being used by more people and more industries to transform the way business is done. Who would have thought a few years ago that you could take a picture of a check with your phone and deposit it. These changes are happening across healthcare, retail and manufacturing to name just a few industries. However, as the volume of information generated from all these mobile devices and other smart devices continues to grow the data has to be stored and made accessible. This is where Cloud computing enters the picture. Through the dynamic provisioning and workload management capabilities of the cloud this avalanche of data can be managed, put to use and delivered efficiently while lowering costs. These lower operational costs can then be used to drive more innovation. Cloud computing and workload centricity are the key cornerstones in making this work. Of course to actually make sense of all this data requires understanding Big Data and how to mine this wealth of data for new insights. Like turning 12 terabytes of Tweets created each day into improved product sentiment analysis. Clearly there are significant competitive advantages that can be achieved through better connecting with the mobile world and smarter devices, reducing cost by managing data in the cloud and performing data analytics across all the data you collect. You want to be leading in the effort not playing catch up.
For our endpoint customers this means you need to be embracing mobile and managing your mobile endpoints. I think this GigaOM article on the MobileFirst announcement stated it well in this excerpt, “Bloom (Paul Bloom, the Research CTO of IBM Telecom) said that IBM has pulled together roughly 10 acquisitions since 2006 that will help with this effort with a special emphasis on WorkLight, a mobile application development platform, and BigFix, which manages distributed endpoints (like thousands of mobile phones!). Building the underlying infrastructure to support the mobile first world is tough. Connecting federated apps via APIs and across different platforms is a problem CIOs and developers are just now trying to solve. And making sure those pieces are then delivered in a beautiful and timely fashion to a massive number of different devices with different operating systems and capabilities is like asking a chef to make a meal that will appeal to every human on earth. That IBM is going after this is not unexpected, but it is a tough order.” The time is now to get ready! |