For an enterprise company like IBM, who counts the world's very largest companies among our customers, security is our middle name.  And although we have a rich portfolio of security products to match diverse user needs, accessing information about our security offerings is surprisingly easy.

The quick path for answers to your questions about security, technical solutions, and IBM's security portfolio is: http://ibm.com/security/, where you can find all we have to offer.

For example, if your interests lie in security for mobile computing see: http://ibm.com/mobilefirst/us/en/why-ibm-for-mobile/security.html. Our industry groups have similar pages, like this one on IBM security solutions in the energy and utilities area: http://ibm.com/software/industry/energy_utilities/Security-Solutions/

Big Data, of course, is a key area right now where security is of paramount importance, and Vijay Dheap, who leads Mobile Security Strategy and Big Data Security Intelligence Solutions for IBM, has started a must-read Security Intelligence blog at: http://securityintelligence.com/

Inclusive to effective Systems Management, our Tivoli brand is heavily focused on security and the following link is a good starting point for information about our Security, Risk and Compliance Management Solutions: http://ibm.com/software/tivoli/solutions/security/

IBM Security Solutions also has its own YouTube channel, http://www.youtube.com/user/IBMSecuritySolutions , which is a good source for the latest information on the very hot and important topic of security in the enterprise space.

Have any specific questions or comments?  Let me know here or better yet, peruse the Security Intelligence blog for additional details and insights!

IBM Global Entrepreneur - IBM Global Entrepreneur program   IBM is interested in partnering with startup software companies that are less than 5 years old, privately held and are actively engaged in developing a technology solution or service that align with our smarter planet vision.   

As part of our smarter planet vision, IBM is looking for entrepreneurs with global ambitions to address world issues in energy, healthcare or other key areas for building a smarter planet to solve enterprise client’s biggest challenges.  IBM Global Entrepreneur opens new doors and resources to entrepreneurs who are bringing the next big idea to market.

Participating in IBM Global Entrepreneur provides the following support and resources:
-    No charge software on-site or in the cloud
-    Unlimited Technical guidance from IBM Project Resource Managers to assist in product development
-    Mentoring and networking through the IBM Innovation Centers
-    Access to IBM industry insights and education to better understand the enterprise customer
-    Visibility as part of the IBM Smarter Planet agenda

IBM is uniquely positioned to help with our depth or resources, global reach and experience with the world’s largest enterprise customers.
Program Manager, NA Global Entrepreneur
ISV & Developer Relations

 
But today we are seeing two new database crop up all over the Valley, NoSQL databases like Mongo DB and Apache Couch DB are changing the development landscape here in Silicon Valley and beyond, welcome to the world of NoSQL or document database that are speeding up app development for the startups that don't need transaction support in their databases.

For Mongo DB it is really easy to get started by reading Karl Seguin's the Little MongoDB Book followed by Kristina Chodrow and & Michael Dirolf's excellent MongoDB the definite Guide

 

What is BlueMix?

For businesses, we wanted to create a system which allows line-of-business users to easily create applications without needing a high level of technical know-how, reduce the total cost of ownership by introducing cost savings inherent in the cloud, and enable businesses to rapidly adjust to their customer and client needs by leveraging the flexibility cloud applications provide--instant updates, new features deployed automatically (high responsiveness from the end-user's perspective).

By doing all of this, the goal is to provide a platform that allows everyone--the developers, the businesses, the end-users--to accelerate their exploration of cloud app capabilities, whether it be to solve social, mobile, or big data needs and challenges--or combinations of the three, to build the next generation of cloud applications and services.

To experiment with BlueMix you can now join the IBM BlueMix beta

A revolutionary concept

On Monday November 11 SVForum’s Venture Finance and Startup SIG and the IBM Innovation Center in Silicon Valley co-hosted an interactive panel discussion about what really goes on between a VC and a startup company before, during and after the financing negotiations. 

The panelists shared negotiating tactics, discussed their experiences, and provided insight into the process of closing a venture capital financing. 

Speakers include Richard Mordini of Javelin Venture Partners, David Greenbaum, Co-Founder & CEO of BoostCTR, which has received the venture capital investment, and Allison Leopold Tilley, Partner Pillsbury Law  who provided the contractual and legal perspective on this process. 

This was one of the biggest turnouts for any event here at the IBM Innovation Center in Foster City this year, including delegations from Colombia and South Korea made up of startup companies, VC and enterprise companies, who all wanted to learn how the startup process works here in Silicon Valley. 

The steadily increasing global reach of Silicon Valley is something we here at the IBM Innovation Center are noticing all the time.

Which ones again demonstrates the important of being in the right place at the right time, just like the IBM Innovation Center at the heart of Silicon Valley.

The IBM Worklight server is used to connect large numbers of mobile clients to enterprise data bases. 

For that reason, Scalability and Hardware Sizing of IBM Worklight

is an important topic, covered in the book by the same name and available on the link above.

Other related subjects are High Availability and Worklight Server Administration  and Typical topology of an IBM Worklight instance

These documents describe optimal topologies and performance tests to determine work loads.

If you have any questions about these and other related Worklight topics, just contact the IBM Innovation Center in Silicon Valley, or an IBM Innovation Center near you.

 

 

By now most people interested in computing know about IBM's Watson, an artificially intelligent computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language,^] developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. The computer system was specifically developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy!. In 2011, Watson competed on Jeopardy! against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. Watson received the first prize of $1 million.

So far Wikipedia.

Now Dr. John E. Kelly III, senior vice president and director of IBM Research and Steve Hamm have written a book about IBM's Watson and the era of Cognitive Cpmputing, to be published by Columbia Business School:

Today, the world is on the cusp of a new phase in the evolution of computing--the era of cognitive systems. The victory of IBM’s Watson on the TV game show Jeopardy! signaled the dawn of this new era. Now, scientists and engineers at IBM and elsewhere are pushing the boundaries of science and technology with the goal of creating machines that sense, learn, reason and interact with people in new ways. Cognitive systems will help people and organizations penetrate complexity and make better decisions—potentially transforming business and society. This is a comprehensive perspective on the future of technology and a call for government, academia and the global tech industry to help power this wave of innovation.

Smart Machines, IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing

A must read book for everyone interested in the new era of computing that is being ushered in by the Waston technology.

 

   Smart Machines: IBM’s Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing

 

A Matatu commuting bus in Nairobi.

Living in Silicon Valley, we naturally pride ourselves on our innovativion skills. From one end of Silicon Valley to the next, the Valley is a virtual beehive of innovation.

On a recent trip to Nairobi I found myself in the happy situation of having to revise this first-world-centric view of the world.

The fact that Kenya, and especially Nairobi, is so advanced in mobile is not a coincidence.  It is usually explained by the fact that Kenya has gone directly to mobile, bypassing land lines.

While that is true, it ignores the traditional Kenyan innovation skills, which has allowed mobile startup companies with very slender resources to create advanced mobile apps running on Feature phones and using SMS and USSD in truly ingenious ways. 

M-Pesa, which is a mobile-phone based money transfer and microfinancing service for Safaricom and Vodacom, is currently the most developed mobile payment system in the world. And implemented on old-fashioned feature phones.

The Nairobi transportation system with matatus, public minibuses/commuter buses, conveys tens of thousands of commuters from the suburbs to downtown Nairobi. They in turn feed into motorcycles that carry the commuters to and from their homes to the bus stops.

A light-way and highly efficient transportation system.

Instead of pedestrian tunnels or bridges on the highways they often implement speed bumps that allow pedestrians to cross the highway between the speed bumps.

And when parts of the Nairobi airport burnt down recently, they quickly built up a new terminal by using a city of tents, for banks, the police, stores and waiting areas. All built up in a matter of days and all functioning surprisingly well.

Innovation doesn't have to involve large amounts of venture capital and advanced computers.  It actuallt exists all over the world, with often highly interesting results.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Open your browser in your smartphone or tablet, point it to the following IBM MobileFirst URL and you have instant access to our latest YouTube videos about various aspects of IBM's mobile offerings.

Prefer to read, then try this URL  and get the latest information about our products and offerings.

Want to get started downloading and implementing, then go to this IBM developerWorks URL

Want to get answers to programming questions, try this URL on StackOverflow

Have other questions? Simply ask it here on the blog as a comment.

In addition:

• Worklight Getting Started
• Worklight InfoCenter
• Worklight blog

 

 

 

 

When enterprise computing now goes mobile, it is a big thing, a global thing, which is why we at the IBM Innovation Center in Silicon Valley is focusing on Worklight and mobile.

In traditional languages and frameworks, the communication inside the app between the web server and the database is the most time-intensive part of the transaction. Node makes a much smaller footprint on your web server. It allocates web server resources on an as-needed basis, not pre-allocating a large chunk of resources for each user. For example, Apache might assign 8MB to a user, while Node assigns 8KB. “The way that Node is more efficient on servers is by not allocating resources to things while it waits,” says Hughes-Croucher.

“Say you have to talk to the database, and that’s going to take 50ms to respond. Instead of assigning all of the processing resources for that 50ms wait, it just uses a placeholder. When the database responds, then it allocates the resources needed to process. That means it’s totally possible to do a lot more requests at once, because you only allocate the server resources when you need to use them, not while you are waiting on databases.”

    Vmware esxi  installed on 19 x hx5 blade servers
        16 cores / blade, 72 GB RAM, 52GB SSD, 8 Gb Fibre Channel HBA
    26 TB's of SAN storage using the IBM XIV Storage and Storwize V7000 with SSD's
The IBM Innvovation Centers provides end-to-end support for Independent Software Vendors (ISV's)
        

Many of my friends ask me what I do at IBM and I tell them that as an IT specialist I focus on Storage Systems. They immediately think of the warehouse self-storage businesses that are used to save grandma's extra furniture.

I explain to them it's not that type of storage. It's the type of storage that keeps their music, pictures, videos and social networking messages safe, accessible and reasonably priced. Once I explain that to them, they get it. Their expectation is that they can share their photos anytime, won't have to wait to play their favorite game and can to keep their data safe and secure at an affordable price.

I've learned that if we can provide the same quick real-world examples to our customers and partners of how IBM Storage Systems provides solutions to their opportunities and challenges, they also get it.

Below are some links to videos that can help you show some of the real world solutions that IBM Storage provides and I can share my own personal experience working with two of IBM technologies.

The IBM FlashSystem Storage provides low latency access to tera bytes of data and can greatly decrease processing time for applications that are very IO intensive and require low latency, i.e.. that is the ability to access data very quickly. Working on one recent engagement we had a discussion about monitoring performance of the system. It was suggested that we log the data every five seconds, but the partner said that the particular test he was running was expected to complete in milliseconds not seconds. Although this was a challenge, this was also a great opportunity. Although the function that was being tested was to determine in real-time if profitable financial trades were possible while a trade was still in transit to the market, this also opened up the possibility whether other real-time analysis such as fraud detection would be possible.
 
Software Defined Storage became very clear to me when I was asked to support an engagement  to create of  a new iSeries partition. Usually creating a new partition takes days to complete, but by using the IBM SAN Volume Controller to create an image of  a running system we were able to complete the task in hours. Software defined storage has allowed us to not only simplify the management of Tera Bytes of data, but add new capabilities that has made us more productive and capable of not only doing more with less, but doing it more quickly.


Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated maximizes performance with IBM FlashSystem Enterprise Solution
http://youtu.be/vRBZaARUW9g?list=PLh9e82xViX4Zp6kC7OpnV4pUmP7X0JxJC

2 minute video showing how IBM Flash Storage decreased the batch forcasting by 50%.
New functions that customers are adding are requiring faster batch processing.


The New IBM TS1150 Tape Drive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLb2VDvYdVQ

Harness big data to achieve superior business results with IBM Software Defined Storage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eit_ziibZog&index=19&list=UUTlb4U5Z56ZcBayeX5XPstA

Capitalize on big data, analytics and improved data economics with IBM Software Defined Storage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZAxtp05hk4&index=20&list=UUTlb4U5Z56ZcBayeX5XPstA


Transform data economics in complex environments with IBM Storwize V7000
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vkc1bsax8s&index=25&list=UUTlb4U5Z56ZcBayeX5XPstA

IBM FlashSystem V840 is designed to harness the power of data
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMpeVikKdxA&list=UUTlb4U5Z56ZcBayeX5XPstA&index=11
 

Whether you're a multimillion dollar enterprise with a team of social media experts or a startup of 5 trying to grow your brand, you are not immune to the pitfalls of a social media crisis. Crises can range from customer complaints to marketing mishaps, both big and small and everything in between. The way you handle a crisis can ultimately strengthen or weaken your brand image.

Here's a list of 10 must-have tips to manage a social media crisis that I walked away with from Marketing and Social Media professor Kimberly Legoki, who spoke at the Disrupting Business: Social Marketing Symposium at IBM's IIC in Foster City, CA. You're going to want to bookmark this list in case of emergency!


1.    Always be listening and monitoring
When crisis strikes, make sure you've got eyes on everything that's being said so that you can quickly respond and fully understand the scope of the crisis. Aggregation tools like Storify can help you keep an ear to the pulse of the story so that you can assess what people are saying.
 

2.    Turn off auto-post immediately
Auto-posting is great for many things, but if you have to address an unfortunate circumstance you don't want it to accidentally be followed by a post that can look insensitive or contradictory.

3.    Immediately acknowledge the situation
Even if you're not ready to release details, if there is a situation that people are talking about, you need to acknowledge that it happened and that you will keep the public in the know as you gather more information. These actions are necessary for taking charge of what people are saying about your brand.

4.    Get your message to as many outlets as possible
While it's best to centralize all of the information, perhaps in a blog, use all other social media channels to direct people to that location.

5.    Correct – don't delete!
Once it's out there, deleting it won't make it go away and it might make it worse. Deleting looks suspect and creates more negative sentiment. If there's a mistake, acknowledge it and update the information.

6.    If you must temporarily disengage, do it the right way
If you must disengage (as @NASAVoyager2 did during the federal government shutdown – insert image) don't suspend or delete the account. Acknowledge that due to circumstances your organization won't be able to respond to or monitor comments via social media and supply an alternative way of reaching out. Let people know when you return.

7.    Own the #hashtag
In your first post about the situation, use the hashtag and continue to use it to encourage others to use it, too. That first post will be the one that gets re-posted again and again.

8.    Monitor online chatter before resuming marketing activities
Before you get back to business as usual, make sure you're listening to what people are saying about the crisis. You don't want to go back to your regularly scheduled marketing until your customers are ready for that.

9.    Adopt a response matrix
This response matrix from the U.S. Airforce can be adopted to your particular crisis.

10. Practice, refine, repeat
It's important to plan ahead for a crisis. Who's going to post to where? Does everyone who would need access to a platform actually have access? Who approves the posts? Have a template ready to go in case of emergency. Practice a mock crisis every 6 months with this team to ensure that everything is in order.

You are now equipped to handle any disaster that comes you're way.  While I hope you never have to use this list, you'll be glad to have it if disaster strikes.

Professor Legoki is a crisis management savant who has managed and studied crises for over 20 years. Her latest project is called “The customer who tweeted #boycott; an empirical investigation of consumer activism on Twitter.” Tweet @KimLegoki and what you want to #boycott, to be included in her research.

Do you have any other tips to add? Any good examples of companies that didn't follow these tips? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

 

Follow me on Twitter @TheZanieLanie

Customer centric organizations require new tools to deliver better on-line customer experiences, for users today who expect better service.  To gain competitive advantage,  on-line marketers need to quickly analyze web and customer issues in order to provide a better web and mobile customer experience.

IBM Tealeaf solutions are such tools.  By capturing and recording digital customer interactions on a website in near real time, Tealeaf allows companies to visualize customer visits to understand user actions, and any unexpected business results.

Recently a large on line travel retailer noticed that site visitors who booked both air travel and rental car reservations had a conversion rate on rental car bookings of almost 90%.  In other words, 90% of customers who booked air travel and then looked at rental cars were converted successfully. However, customers who just visited the site for rental cars were only showing a conversion rate of some 13%.  By installing and using IBM Tealeaf tools, the retailer found the following:

• For car rental only travelers, the website code was defaulting the arrival time for car pickup to midnight (unbeknown to the end user).  Hence when the web software looked for car rentals at that time, it found that most airport rental agencies were closed at midnight, so returned the default message,  “no cars available” to the on-line shopper.
• Air Travelers meanwhile inherited a car pick up time of the airline flight arrival time, which resulted in a high conversion to rental car bookings.

Using IBM Tealeaf,  the on-line retailer was able to gain deeper insight into the customer experience and see quickly how their own web site software was causing the problem of low conversion rates on rental cars, for car only shoppers.  This allowed a quick correction to the web software which in turn drove higher revenue from on-line car rental bookings.

For any online businesses facing pressure to increase revenue and decrease cost, managing the customer’s experience has to be part of an essential strategy.  IBM Tealeaf solutions provide the ability to monitor a customer’s website issues on an almost real time basis.   Tealeaf allows organizations to intercept web problems quickly, to increase revenues and customer loyalty.  In effect, it allows on-line merchants to view their own digital commerce sites thru the eyes of their customers, and experience it as they do. Reading the tealeaves has become an important part of managing  web businesses.

 

Smarter Commerce, up to just recently, has been kind of a nebulous term to me.  Hard to actually define.  In effect, it is using  up to date new tools, such as mobile technology, social technologies,  analytics,  and cloud technologies to build applications that a few years ago were unheard of, or probably impossible to construct due to lack of computing power or tools to execute them.

I recently experienced "smarter commerce" first hand, which brought home to me the power of these new applications and why they are so important.  My interaction with "smarter commerce" was via United Airlines.  The Airline industry has made a lot of recent strides to improve service and customer satisfaction by using smarter commerce type applications.

In my situation I was scheduled for an air trip to Rochester NY.  I received the normal email message 24 hours prior to departure to check in.  I did this on line, and completed printing of boarding passes etc.  At that point, I thought my interaction with United was complete until the following day at the baggage drop off.  However, late that afternoon, I got a mobile text message addressed to me from United on my Samsung 4 Galaxy.  United informed me that my flight that I had checked in for to  Washington DC was cancelled due to mechanical problems.  It also directed me on the spot to a UAL site to choose a replacement combination of flights AND seats to reach my destination at around the same time.  I was able to complete this in a short time and actually book a replacement flight via Chicago that got me to Rochester 45 minutes earlier.  So I went to the airport the next day, with booked flights,  seats and no issues.  I tried to imagine this trip maybe a few years ago.  I would have arrived at the airport to check in with boarding passes for a flight that was cancelled,  stood in line for minutes if not hours getting new bookings, and of course been delayed hours if not days due to lack of available alternatives at the later time. So United Airlines,  by using a little data analytics, and mobile technology had taken a potentially bad customer sat situation and turned it into a positive.  A very powerful business case.

Smarter Commerce allows companies to put the customer at the center of the process, instead of the company at the center. It anticipates, via analytics and an extension of core system data, and uses mobile and social tools to allow optimization and real time action to deal with business problems, that even just several years ago, were impossible to deal with.  Smarter Commerce is.....,  your customer in context.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Infrastructure matters because business outcomes matter and new outcomes entail new infrastructure demands.

With new workloads, such as, cloud, analytics, mobile and social placing additional demands on the server, sever virtualization management tool and storage systems we are currently utilizing - the right infrastructure matters, and the right infrastructure needs to be fast, flexible, reliable, secure, and manageable.

Come learn how the breakthrough with Flash storage combined with the very latest innovative IBM POWER8 technology announcements meet these new demands.

Technical details:

PowerVC:
PowerVC is the new advanced virtualization management offering for Power Systems, built on OpenStack. PowerVC delivers advanced virtualization management for IBM AIX and Linux environments on IBM POWER Systems. PowerVC has quick time to value as the focus of this offering is simplicity and ease of use. PowerVC enables Power Systems customers to lower their Total Cost of Ownership with simplified ease of use and capabilities, easily deploy and move workloads and maximize resource utilization. PowerVC has been built to require little to no training to get moving on optimizing your power system virtualization, with advanced placement policies and monitoring and management of VMs.

PowerVC editions include the following features and benefits:

• Virtual machine image capture, deployment, resizing, and management
• Resource pooling through shared storage pools
• Policy-based VM placement to help improve usage and reduce complexity
• Real-time management optimization and VM resilience to help increase productivity
• VM Mobility with placement policies to help reduce burden on IT staff in a simplified GUI
• A management system that manages existing PowerVM deployments
• Security through existing Active Directory deployments

PowerVC Standard Edition includes new support for PowerKVM which includes the following features and benefits:

• Support for managing Red Hat and SUSE guest VMs that are running under PowerKVM
• Enhanced storage configurations specific to PowerKVM, including NFS storage
• Support for Open vSwitch network configurations under PowerKVM    

 

Register at this link

IBM BlueMix is IBM's new PaaS environment.

Learn more on this link. And if you want to do some background reading on PaaS and how it is revolutioinazing app development in the cloud, what better book to read than Lucas Carlson's Programming for Paas.?

If you have any questions about IBM BlueMix just reach out to your neighborhood IBM Innovation Center or let us here at the IBM Innovation Center in Silicon Valley know.

To get started with BlueMix, simply click on this link.

 

 

The 100 BlueMix Days - Hands-On Workshop at the IBM Innovation Center in Silicon Valley on Friday March 28 drew a full house of IBM business partners.

IBM BlueMix is an implementation of IBM’s Open Cloud Architecture, leveraging Cloud Foundry to enable developers to rapidly build, deploy, and manage their cloud applications, while tapping a growing ecosystem of available services and runtime frameworks. IBM will provide services and runtimes into the ecosystem based on our extensive software portfolio.

If you are interested in learning more about IBM BlueMix, just contact the nearest IBM Innovation Center.

 

On Saturday, March 29, 2014, a team from the IBM Innovation Center in Silicon Valley attended the  2014 Harker Research Symposium to introduce IBM programs and technologies of interest to the tech-savy students.

The Harker School is a private, co-educational, non-profit college preparatory school in San Jose, California, United States. Founded in 1893, with its own incubator and students who already have their own startup companies. The Research Symposium drew a large croud of students to the IBM booth. 

Of the several hundred students who visited the booth and talked to the IBM team, the vast majority were interested in 1) IBM Watson, 2) the IBM Global Entrepreneur program.and 3) Internships at IBM.

Several students had already founded their own companies and were clearly on the path of becoming he future movers and shakers of Silicon Valley.

The starting point is that we have a Windows 7 computer with or without Java already installed.

 

Step One: Install Java unless it has already been installed

If we don't already have Java installed, we will begin by installing 64 bit Java: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk7-downloads-1880260.html. We will use the install defaults.

If we already have Java installed, Eclipse should pick that up automatically. So then we wouldn't have to install Java a second time.

 

Step Two: Install Eclipse

 

With the JDK installed, we will then install the Eclipse Kepler edition 64 bits

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eclipse should pick up the location of your JDK during the installation.

Step Three: Install the IBM Worklight Developer Edition Eclipse Plugin

 

From within Eclipse, we will now Install the IBM Worklight Developer Edition
     Eclipse->Help-> Eclipse Marketplace

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step Four: Install the Android Developer Tools plugin for Eclipse.

After we have installed the IBM Worklight Developer edition plugin for eclipse, we need to install the Android Developer Tools plugin for Eclipse.

In Eclipse, we select Help->Install New Software  and then enter the information in the dialog box below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two groups will appear: Developer Tools and NDK Plugins.

Click on Next and Finish.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More information here: http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/mobile-solutions/worklight/docs/v610/01_03_Setting_up_your_Android_development_environment.pdf

After the ADT plug-in installation is complete and Eclipse restarted, click Window > Android SDK Manager

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Important: If the Android SDK Manager / AVD Manager is not visible in the Window menu,

• click Window -> Customize Perspective -> Command Groups Availability,
• and select the Android SDK and AVD Manager checkbox.

 

After having done that, you can click on the Java Tab over at the right of the screen, and then see the two highlighted icons show up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The down arrow brings up the Android SDK manager and the Green Icon to the right of it brings up the Android Virtual Device Manager

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You are now able to start working with the Android SDK manager and the Android Virtual Device Manager.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You are now ready to start running some of the Worklight Sample Apps

You are then ready to start writing your first apps. The best way to get started is to import existing apps from this URL.

in Eclipse, simple click on File->Import->General->Existing Projects into Workspace. 

 

 

 

The IBM MobileFirst portfolio is made up of a rapidly growing number of products. Let's go thru the portfolio one by one to learn how we can use each individual product, either alone or together with other products, to create innovative mobile solutions.

We'll start with Xtify which delivers cloud-based mobile push messaging and digital wallet/passbook capabilities, enabling businesses to deliver rich, engaging, personalized content to on-the-go consumers anytime, anywhere.

More on Xtify on this link:

• For CMOs and their organizations, Xtify extends IBM Enterprise Marketing Management digital messaging capabilities by adding mobile application push and mobile web push to our existing digital marketing execution channels. Providing customers with deeper connections and a faster way to engage, nurture and grow their customer base.
• This acquisition helps mobile enterprises provide timely, relevant and customized interactions with their customers. Enhancing the capabilities of IBM’s MobileFirst Platform, supporting all development approaches including Hybrid, Web and Native, providing maximum flexibility to developers who are building mobile applications.
• As part of IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative, Xtify will make it easier for organizations to embrace mobile commerce and drive in-store traffic to increase sales – using their customer’s contextual information to create and deliver seamless, intuitive customer interactions – at the right time, in the right place and through their mobile device of choice.

Now let's take a look at some demos:

 

 

 

If you have any questions about Xtify, reach out to your nearest IBM Innovation Center.

 

After many years and much hype the Internet of Things is finally here and IBM is already a key player in this important technology that aims to connect not people but billions of instrumented things.

The Internet of Things represents an evolution in which objects are capable of interacting with other objects. Hospitals can monitor and regulate pacemakers long distance, factories can automatically address production line issues and hotels can adjust temperature and lighting according to a guest's preferences, to name just a few examples. Furthermore, as the number of devices connected to the Internet continues to grow exponentially, your organization's ability to send, receive, gather, analyze and respond to events from any connected device increases as well.

IBM already has a number of products in this space, such as IBM MessageSight and WebSphere MQ Telemetry for interconnecting devices

Jordan Novett writes on Venturebeat horw: AT&T teams with IBM, Linux Foundation to get cities onboard with Internet of Things

AT&T is joining forces with IBM to cash in on the hot Internet of Things megatrend, with plans to initially target cities and utility companies, the companies announced today.

AT&T brings a worldwide network. Big Blue has software for analyzing and visualizing a bunch of data coming from sensors planted all over the place. And it has hardware to process all the data.

Together, these giants have a shot at streaming in revenue from one of the hottest types of emerging technology today.

For more information, reach out to your local friendly IBM Innovation Center.

 

 

 

Architecting mobile solutions is much more than just writing an app and hope for the best.

There is the mobile client which is written in IBM Worklight, and which communicates with the IBM Worklight Server,

which is a Mobile Enterprise Application Platform of MEAP. But what sits at the other end of the Worklight Server.

Well for commerce apps the obvious choice is the WebSphere Commerce 

As this presentation shows

 

 

So we instantiate a cloud instance of WebSphere Commerce and then connect to it through its JSON-based REST API.

Which means that we can create a cloud-based on-line store and then connect to it from a smartphone app written in Worklight. 

Fast, efficient and really cool.

 

More on IBM 

 

IBM's Worklight 6.1 has now been released with a number of new important features:

• Easier IT operations with mobile application upgrade independent of server upgrades, new server deployment without mobile application rebuild, improved license usage management, device de-provisioning, and Application Center enhanced resilience on 2-G networks
• Improved developer productivity with new UI-based automated SOAP and SAP service discovery, custom patterns and instant application previews
• Expanded security capabilities with FIPS140-2 for data in motion and user certificate provisioning for client-side authentication
• Updated mobile operating system support, including support for recent levels of iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Microsoft™ Windows™ 8 and RT, and Windows Phone 8 in addition to third-party software support updates for JQuery Mobile and Dojo
• Translation of mobile application user-facing texts into Chinese (simplified = zh), Chinese (Traditional Han = zh-tw), French (fr), German (de), Italian (it), Japanese (ja), Korean (ko), Portuguese (Brazil = pt), Russian (ru) and Spanish (es)
• More APIs for native application developers

 

 

The IBM Innovation Center in Silicon Valley is hosting an event around IBM's MobileFirst portfolio of products during the first quarter of 2014 at our facilities in Foster City.

A Connect to Win is an executive event where you will meet with peers from IBM and other Business Partners to help uncover new opportunities. This session facilitates the creation of successful business connections to drive sales through technology integration, joint marketing, and engagements with the IBM and RSI, ISV and/or Reseller sales teams.

The IBM MobileFirst portfolio of products makes it easy to develop secure and high-performance mobile apps for small-medium-large enterprise market.

At this event we will discuss development methodologies and technologies, the app development lifecycle,  the latest products in our portfolio, such as Fiberlink, Xtify, Trusteer and Urban Code.

We will hear directly from IBM business partners who are using IBM MobileFirst products and last but not least,

we will hear from the IBM team that connected IBM Worklight and IBM Watson for Healthcare, demonstrating how cognitive computing funcitonality running on massive systems can be made available on smartphones and tablets.

More about the Watson Worklight hookup in this video:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the one corner the mighty IBM mainframe, also knows as System z, in the other the tiny smartphone. Can the two co-exist? The answer is yes, thanx to IBM Worklight and the CICS Transaction Server Feature Pack for Mobile Extensions. 

Here are some details from the URL above:

• Ideal for companies that wish to build mobile applications to exploit existing enterprise services hosted within the robust and scalable CICS environment
• Uses existing CICS web service technology: a separate WSBIND file provides the mapping from the COBOL, C/C++, or PL/I language structures to JSON, or from JSON back to the language structure
• Requests are process by CICS in a web service pipeline, taking advantage of the proven web service infrastructure within CICS Transaction Server
• JSON greatly simplifies connectivity to mobile devices, particularly when using IBM Worklight Server, as you no longer need to write extensive custom adapter code to invoke CICS services

So if you have a mainframe and want to share date on smartphones, just download the Feature Pack and IBM's Worklight and get started. It is as easy as that. And if you don't have a mainframe but would like to buy one, just let us know. We're here to help.

 

There is even an IBM Redbook on: Implementing IBM CICS JSON Web Services for Mobile Applications

 

IBM BlueMix  the next generation cloud platform based on IBM's Open Cloud Architecture and Cloud Foundry

More information about this exciting platform: Explore IBM BlueMix  David Barnes demonstrates the IBM BlueMix application composition environment  Join IBM's David Barnes as he details IBM BlueMix, an in-the-cloud platform that provides the cloud application capabilities that will power the next generation of cloud applications and services.

Check out Bluemix here: https://ibm.biz/iicsvbluemix

 

Everything you wanted to know about the IBM Worklight Server in a single tweet:

http://t.co/kmfS4k4idG

http://t.co/xX9653ieE0

and http://t.co/KgXW3Nu36T

pic.twitter.com/8USfg3Cilm 

— IBMSiliconValley (@IBMSValley) November 20, 2013

 

The famous mathematician Benoît B. Mandelbrot began working for IBM in 1958, where he stayed for 35 years and became an IBM Fellow, the highest technical rank in IBM.

As Wikipedia writes: 

Because of his access to IBM's computers, Mandelbrot was one of the first to use computer graphics to create and display fractal geometric images, leading to his discovering the Mandelbrot set in 1979.

IBM and http://IBMblr.Tumblr.com celebrate the life of Benoit B. Mandelbrot, IBM Fellow Emeritus and Fractal Pioneer. In this final interview shot by filmmaker Erol Morris, Mandelbrot shares his love for mathematics and how it led him to his wondrous discovery of fractals. His work lives on today in many innovations in science, design, telecommunications, medicine, renewable energy, film (special effects), gaming (computer graphics) and more.

 

Mandelbrot died in october 2010.

Learn more about fractals at http://IBMblr.tumblr.com/tagged/fractal and join the fractal frenzy with the IBMblr Fractalizer.

Recently there have been a lot of new developments in the realm of Power Systems IBM i storage options.  Historically, IBM i users have gravitated to Internal storage for a variety of reasons.  However, some strategic influencers are driving more and more use of external SAN based storage.  Those would include,  Power HA and backup considerations;  Live Partition Mobility,  Lower costs (of SAN storage);  Improved connection capabilities; and Improved utilization via cloud technologies.

IBM i supports three basic disk attachment methods:  1) Native attach via raid adapters to internal disks or expansion drawers;  2)  Native attach via Fiber channel adapters to supported SAN storage, which includes DS8000, SVC, V7000, V5000 and V3700;  or 3)  VIOS attached storage options.

Some of the Identifying factors that need to be considered when determining which type of disk storage is right for a particular IBM i environment:

- Size of data in the Enterprise - isolating or consolidating?

- I/O Performance required

- Availability and Backup Requirements

- Data Replication options and POWER HA

- Live Partition Mobility Requirements

- Frequency of deploying new partitions or workloads

-  Flexibility vs  Complexity

- Cost

The following requirements might indicate that SAN storage is a preferable solution:

1- Consolidation of partitions via virtualization

2- The sharing of limited fiber ports

3- The need for thin provisioning

4- Large disk requirements on smaller servers that might otherwise cause users upgrade to larger servers to support more internal disk.

5- Desire for improved availability and recovery with disk based replication and PowerHA,

6- The need to shorten backup cycles using Flash Copy services.

Old guidelines for SAN storage performance on IBM i OS have pretty much been replaced by a new reality due to increased performance of adapters and back end storage. In many cases SAN storage performance can equal or exceed internal disk performance, depending on configurations. Several years ago this was not the  case.

LUN sizing hints and tips for IBM i with direct fiber attach SAN disk:

- On the DS8000 series, LUNS must be defined to provide 520 byte sector support for IBM i

- The requirement for Fiber Channel adapters is driven by the quantity of LUNS and paths available. A maximum of 32 luns is supported per IOP adapter; and a maximum of 64 luns on the IOP-less adapters.

- Minimum LUN size is currently 17.5GB;  Maximum is 2.0TB minus 512 bytes

- A minimum of 6 luns is recommended in any ASP where you care about performance;  basic guidance says  12 luns per virtual scsi adapter, with a maximum of 16.

The IBM Disk Magic tool can be used to model the size and number of luns required.

IBM i has many new storage options for both internal and external uses. IBM Power Systems  and IBM System Storage continue to provide the most integrated and efficient solutions. More Information on these technologies is available here:

-  IBM i 7.1 Technical Overview Redbook  -   http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/sg247858.html?Open

-  IBM i Storage Techdocs  - http://www.ibm.com/support/techdocs/atsmastr.nsf/WebIndex/PRS4011

 

 

The "Mobile First" Practitioners of Silicon Valley is hosting a mobile workshop where you can get hands experience on with the IBM Worklight product.

The event is held from 9am - 4pm at 425 Market St. in San Francisco. This is a golden opportunity to learn how to program mobile apps in HTML5 and native code with IBM's Eclipsed-based Worklight, Studio, and then deploy them to the enterprise-grade Worklight Server.

If interested please register on this Meetup link.

And while we are on the topic of Worklight and app programming, don't miss this event at the IBM Innovation Center in Silicon Valley on December 11

 

IBM is moving with extreme speed on the mobile front, acquiring a steady stream of mobile companies. Trusteer, Xtify and Urban Code, and now Fiberlink. A sign of how important IBM considers the mobile space for the enterprise.

IBM clearly intends to play the same revolutionary role it played in the PC revolution and before that with System 360. Now that the enterprise is moving to mobile, IBM intents to lead the massive movement to mobile in the global enterprise space.

More on this link:

IBM to Acquire Fiberlink Communications, Transforming the Mobile Management and Security Market  Cloud-Based Mobile Management and Security Capabilities to Expand IBM MobileFirst Solutions; Organizations to Gain the Confidence and Flexibility to Fully Embrace Mobility 

 

With Fiberlink’s MaaS360 cloud-based offerings, IBM will expand its bring your own device (BYOD) capabilities to deliver a complete mobile management and security solution through IBM MobileFirst that includes trusted transactions and security intelligence capabilities for mobile apps, users, content and data.  

This announcement is another milestone in IBM’s strategy to build the industry’s most comprehensive set of mobile capabilities while eliminating barriers to adoption and accelerating the productivity benefits of mobility. At the same time, IBM is expanding the vision for enterprise mobility management to also include secure transactions between businesses, partners and customers. 

Stay tuned for more on this story and join us at the IBM Innovation Center in Foster City in Silicon Valley for our mobile event on December 11, when we will cover the latest on IBM's mobile story.

 

 

 

In a truly audacious move, IBM has just announced that it is rolling out its cognitive supercomputer Watson into the cloud, making it available to users all over the world. Quentin Hardy writes in the New York Times

Companies, academics and individual software developers will be able to use it at a small fraction of the previous cost, drawing on IBM’s specialists in fields like computational linguistics to build machines that can interpret complex data and better interact with humans.... It is also an indication of how quickly the technology industry is changing, from complex systems that cost millions to install to pay-as-you-go deals that provide small companies and even individuals access to technology that just a few years ago only the largest companies could afford.

This announcement comes shortly after IBM demoed Watson accessibility on tablets thru Worklight, its mobile environment.

What we are seeing is a brand new deployment model where a massive cognitive supercomputer like Watson quickly can be brought out of the lab and the hospitals where Watson for Healthcare has been deployed until now, and onto the global cloud.

This move leverages IBM's strong position in mobile and cloud computing, and ushers in a brave new world where a global enterprise company like IBM can move as fast as if it was a startup company in Silicon Valley.

Stay tuned, this is just the beginning of the Watson story.

 

SSD drives and Flash storage are becoming crucial technologies to our business partners around the world. Larry Garibay explains how we at the innovation center in Silicon Valley are working with these technologies in the enterprise space, and how you as business partners can make use of our services.

If you are interested in these technologies, just reach out to us or comment on this blog post.

 

IBM's Watson has introduced cognitive computing to the world, not only winning the game of Jeopardy but also allowing doctors to make sense of the tsunami of data that is generated in the medical field.

Up until now, doctors have been able to access Watson from traditional desktop computers. But they will now be able to do so from their smartphones. Thanx to a pilot project out of IBM Research that has leveraged IBM's innovative Worklight mobile technology together with Watson.

Ton Ngo, Simon Leung and Winnie Tsang write on IBM developerWorks: Prototype mobile applications built with IBM Worklight for IBM Watson  How an IBM team extended a healthcare user interface for IBM Watson from desktop to mobile

The IBM Watson solutions team developed a sophisticated browser-based application that not only presents IBM Watson query results to oncologists but also facilitates their patient-consultation workflow. The IBM High Performance On Demand Global Solutions (HiPODS) Enterprise Mobile team has now extended this solution with full mobile support. Using IBM® Worklight® as the supporting infrastructure, the team created a prototype for a sophisticated mobile app to complement the browser-based application.

....

The mobile application prototype runs on a tablet so that the doctor can refer to the patient EMR and query IBM Watson while seeing the patient. For consistency, the views of the mobile application are similar in content, look, and feel to those in the browser-based application. But the doctor can also interact with the mobile application with gestures such as swiping or pinching. In addition, the mobile app supports the tablet's audio and camera features. The doctor can add to the EMR by dictating directly into the tablet or using the tablet's camera to take photos of the patient

This is a really important article for anyone interested in how mobile technology can be used in advanced medicine.

Read it.

And for anyone interested in Worklight and mobile computing, contact us here at the blog or your nearest IBM Innovation Center.

 

 

 

 

 

IBM, LIbelium and the Internet of Things

IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Libelium, a wireless sensor network hardware provider, today released an Internet of Things Starter Kit to enable dozens of sensor applications ranging from monitoring parking spaces or air pollution to providing assistance for the elderly.

Created by IBM scientists and Libelium engineers to ease application development, testing, and scalability of wireless sensor networks (WSN), the new Internet of Things Starter Kit integrates Libelium’s Waspmote wireless sensor platform with IBM’s Mote Runner software and 6LoWPAN, which allows every single sensor and device to connect directly to the Internet using the new IPv6 protocol.

The development environment of Mote Runner consists a complete tool chain (i.e., converter, assembler, optimizer, shell) to develop mote applications in high-level object-oriented languages such as Java. It comes with its own IDE based on Eclipse as well as a mote and network simulation environment to ease application development and testing. A web-based deployment and monitoring framework in concert with an edge server finally allows the integration and visualization of Mote Runner sensor networks.

Agam Shah på IDG writes about the announcement:

IBM's do-it-yourself kit makes Internet of things accessible

The companies on Monday introduced the Waspmote Mote Runner, a computer that can collect and share data with other devices within wireless range. IBM is providing the software tools while Libelium is making the hardware, which will include sensors to collect weather, server temperature and other information.

The hardware is a motherboard with sensors for gases, oxygen, carbon dioxide, temperature, motion, light, soil temperature, GPS and others. The board comes with standard interfaces including Ethernet and serial interfaces, so it can be plugged into existing hardware like smart meters or installations like solar energy plants.

More from IBM about the Internet of Things

 

Getting started with IBM Worklight for app development is easy. The first and foremost URL is the following:  Get started with IBM Worklight 6.0

The material is logically divided into client side development and server-side development.

Server-side development is development of HTML5 or native code that will run in the hand-set. And if you are familiar with HTML5 and

Javascript then everything should be familiar to you.

There is also Advanced Client Side with subjects like Working Offline, Enabling translation, Storing sensitive data in Encrypted Cache and the JSON store.

Server-side development is all about writing adapters in JavaScript, that will allow you to quickly connect to backend data sources. And that mostly but not exclusively means enterprise data sources. The adapters may be called Worklight's secret sauce  and cover HTTP, SQL, Cast Iron and JMS adapters. Most with code samples and exercises

We then move on to Authentication and Security, a must in the enterprise space, and then to Advanced Topics under which we find IBM Worklight Scalability & Hardware Sizing
Hardware Calculator.

Worklight scalability really means Worklight Server scalability and this section has everything you need to know about this interesting and vital topic.

The  IBM Worklight and Mobile Platform V6.0.0 Scalability and Hardware Sizing is a key document, accompanied by the Hardware Calculator 

So what do you need to get started? Nothing really, except for a knowledge of HTML5 and JavaScript, that is really important.

You can download the Worklight Developer Edition from this URL 

and then all you need is a regular laptop. The Worklight Developer Edition comes with an embedded Worklight server, from which you can connect to backend data sources.

And if you have any questions, just contact your nearest IBM Inovation Center or comment on this blog.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The week of Oct 20, IBM held the Enterprise 2013 conference in Orlando.  (note this is Power University combined with System Z Enterprise University). It was a great location and the sessions were well attended by IBM customers,  partners, and a few IBMers.  Power University is always a good spot to get a great overview of coming announcements in the Power Systems arena, as well as some timely training sessions and lab exercises on some of the latest technical developments.

IBM even rented out Universal Studios for the group as one evenings activity.  A good time was had by all.

Here are my thoughts on some of the highlights from a Power Systems perspective:

1-  Power 8 is coming.  It seems to be again a REVOLUTIONARY step from Power 7, just as 7 was to 6.  Performance is increased a lot, and cost per MIP will be down.  Here is more detail from Computerworld magazine -  http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9241920/IBM_s_new_Power8_doubles_performance_of_Watson_chip

One amazing chart they put up.  A  Power 5 machine of the day took up a whole rack and cost over $1 M dollars.  The Power 8 equivalent processing power can fit in 1-4 U size and cost a level of magnitude or more less than the Power 5 machine.

2-  Power VC is coming soon.  Power VC to me is like VMware for Power servers  only.  i.e. virtualization tools that will just support power systems,  AIX and Linux in December, and IBM i announced as a statement of direction.   Interestingly enough the interface will look a lot like V7000 storage console interface. Preliminary views seem to show it is very easy to use.  It was well received by the Power users in the room.

3- Virtualization technology is becoming more accepted.  Power users see the need for it and benefits from it.  Utilization of machines is increasing a lot, therby resulting in more efficiency.  As virtualization tools improve, this will just increase.

4- Data use, and the need for storage is increasing rapidly.  This is a high growth area.  Use of Flash Storage is growing rapidly.  On display was one rack of IBM 820 flash storage which could hold over 2 pedabytes of data.  Good overview here of the flash technology from IBM -  http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/flash/

5-  This was the best attended Power University I have seen in some time.  A very high percentage of the attendees were customers.  I would say 60% customers,  35% partners, 5% IBMers as a guess.

All in all, a well run event by IBM, at a very nice facility right next to Disney World.  A worthwhile 5 days for sure, for any IBM Power users.

 

 

Big Data and Analytics is rapidly emerging field that is engaging an increasing number of our business partners here at the IBM Innovation Center here in Silicon Valley. 

This is hardly surprising considering IBM's leading position in this space: http://ibm.co/17nXhrj and the fact that Silicon Valley really is the ground zero for the Big Data movement in the US and the world.

Over the next several weeks and months I'll discuss IBM’s presence in this space from several different perspectives: the IBM products and their functionality, IBM business partners and their solutions in the Big Data space, and finally IBM's view of the Big Data and Analytics ecosystem as a whole. 

As you read these blog posts, if you’d like me to cover a specific topic that I haven’t covered, just post a comment.  If the amount of interest warrants it, we’ll create a forum outside these blog posts to discuss further.

It may come as a surprise to some, but IBM has been in the analytics space for at least the 35 years that I have been in the business.  Back when I was just getting started, IBM was creating the concept of the "Business Information Center" and "Decision Suport Systems", using "4^th generation languages" like Focus and Mantis, to produce both ad hoc and canned reports for the business.  All this on the mainframe of course.

The next step was to extract data from the operational systems to data files where reporting could be done without interfering with business processing.  In essence, these were primitive data warehouses.

How far IBM and the analytics industry have come since then! 

From that base we now routinely build systems that apply statistical techniques to drive fact-based, actionable predictions that can save our customers many millions of dollars. 

Case in point: I have recently worked as part of a team at an electric power utility on a condition-based maintenance Proof of Concept (POC).  The utility gathers performance data from field devices, combines that with preventive maintenance data from the Enterprise Asset Management system (IBM Tivoli Maximo) to predict a failure point using Cognos Enterprise and SPSS.  If the predicticed failure point falls before the next preventive maintenance cycle, the unit can be maintained or retired before a failure causes a large scale outage. 

The POC is completed with a very satisfied customer, but since only a small fraction of the utility’s field devices have been instrumented, the utility is faced with how to collect the performance data from a huge number of devices.  A task that, when completed, will move them squarely into the Big Data space.  We’ll talk more about this in future posts.

What I really want to talk about now is the suite of capabilities that focus on adding value to business by finding and qualifying customers.  Just as in the utility field devices, it’s only since the advent of the mobile platforms with their  social apps that business have had the ability to acquire data on how the individual customer really regards its products. And it is only in the very recent past that businesses have acquired the ability to analyze the data in a meaningful way. 

The acquisition of Sterling Commerce http://ibm.co/1aBqbmj, Vivisimo http://ibm.co/1ipbJyA, Tealeaf http://ibm.co/1hndP4h and Algorithmics  http://ibm.co/1dij2aT, has provided IBM's Big Data Platform with an unparalelled analytic capability that can be applied to the unstructured Big Data stored by Apache Hadoop.

Which is also part of the IBM Big Data portfolio.

I am currently working with a local cloud-based business intelligence and analytics company on a POC to take data from Salesforce to produce near real-time analytics and trending for a large media company. 

We’re just starting. But the future looks bright for this company and others. 

Stay tuned.  I’ll profile the company and our results in future posts.

 

 

At the end of February IBM completed the acquisition of a small Israel-based provider of mobile software for smartphones and tablets. An acquisition that ushered in a whole new era of mobile computing not just at IBM,  but in the global enterprise space as a whole.

Today, 20 months later, Worklight has blossomed into IBM MobileFirst, a full-fledged portfolio of mobile products, and Gartner has positioned IBM as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for  Mobile Application Development Platforms

The mobile revolution has much in common with the personal computer revolution in the 1980's here in Silicon Valley, and even with the IBM System 360 revolution in the 1960s, which ushered in mainframe-based enterprise computing to the world.

What gives the mobile revolution such a strong impact  is that it is not a silo all by itself, but closely tied in with Cloud Computing, which is where the mobile data is all stored, with Big Data, because the data generated by billions of mobile phones and tablets is truly big, with Social, because all of us who use smartphones and tables are in constant contact with our friends and peers, and last but not least with Analytics, because the gigantic floods of data gushing out of the mobile space can all be sliced and diced and analyzed by products in  the IBM analytics portfolio

The mobile and social enterprise will look quite different from previous siloed enterprises. It will sail much closer to its customers than ever before, customers will be able to engage in a dialog with the enterprise and vice versa. And thanx to the open source movement and the new "API economy", the strict border between the enterprise and the customers will become ever more diffuse.

IBM MobileFirst is placing its emphasize on rapid development with Worklight, on enterprise integration with Cast Iron,
on automatic testing with Rational Workbench, on Scanning and certification of mobile apps with AppScan, of the secure management of BYOD with Endpoint Manager, and with customer insights with Tealeaf.

A portfolio of products for rapidly building and deploying secure mobile apps in the enterprise.

From a small startup company to the major player in the enterprise mobile space in 20 months.

 

Humans and machines working together

In traditional AI, humans are not part of the equation, yet in cognitive computing, humans and machines work together. To enable a natural interaction between them, cognitive computing systems use image and speech recognition as their eyes and ears to understand the world and interact more seamlessly with humans. It provides a feedback loop for machines and humans to learn from and teach one another. By using visual analytics and data visualization techniques, cognitive computers can display data in a visually compelling way that enlightens humans and helps them make decisions based on data.

The question of how men and machines will interact int he future and what the results will be is discussed by the american economist Tyler Cowan in his essay The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better

 

IBM's Watson, Neurosynaptic chips and cognitive computing. More on the IBM Research website

Nairobi equals mobile; the Nairobi mobile market is highly active, very innovative and eclectic.  Startup companies like MoDE, named IBM Global Entrepreneur of the year 2013, is an example of the startup companies one sees in Nairobi.

Many of them are built around the USSD and SMS standards, and focused on the feature phone market, which still is dominant in Kenya and the rest of Africa.

But that is changing. There are electronics store everywhere featuring the very latest smartphones and tablet and 4G is being rolled out as well.

So the interest in IBM's Worklight was high when we taught two classes at the Innovation Center in Nairobi.

Over 40 students showed up at short notice and tore into the class materials as if there was no tomorrow.

After two hours it was time to ask if the students were ready to proceed to lab 2. The answer was not holy unexpected. "Lab 2?  we are already on lab 3 and 4".

Smart programmers, a mobile culture and the IBM Innovation Center combine to make the Nairobi mobile marked a natural for Worklight and the iBM MobileFirst portfolio of products.