Bruce Allen from BR Allen Associates LLC, an IT technology strategy and consulting firm, has written an excellent 9-page White Paper contrasting IBM and EMC's latest strategies. Here are some key excerpts:

"The term “information infrastructure” is over 40 years old, but its characteristics and requirements in today’s world are quite new indeed. Specifically, federating all storage enterprise wide, consolidating and standardizing onto virtualized, high-capacity media, and enabling dynamic, cloud-ready provisioning are among the major new IT challenges. Moreover, continued explosive storage growth demands that a systematic approach be crafted to address the full spectrum of current and future (information) compliance, availability, retention and security goals. For many customers, this transformation must occur amidst a storage growth rate of 50%-70% CAGR.

...IBM’s Information Infrastructure focus is a core element and foundational pillar in its Dynamic Infrastructure and New Intelligence initiatives, both well defined and tightly coupled to an umbrella vision and strategy called “Smarter Planet.” It is also important to remember that IBM has its own vast, internal infrastructure, and is transforming it in the same manner prescribed to customers. IBM’s increased investment in solution centers and expertise to develop and test drive customer solutions demonstrates its resolve in this area.

...In contrast, storage vendor EMC references information infrastructure as half of its bifurcated strategy,1 with virtualization being the other half. The two are represented by slightly overlapping circles, and interestingly, these two circles essentially mirror the EMC organization. ...Analysis of both the strategy and the organization indicates a continued strong product focus, a stark contrast to IBM’s strategy that puts solutions first and products second.

...IBM’s Information Infrastructure strategy and portfolio takes a more holistic approach and appears to be shifting its own organizations and partners from pure product focus to a true solution orientation that more directly addresses customer needs. ...IBM views these elements as integral to any information-led transformation, but its competitors fall well short in this arena.

...As a system vendor, IBM clearly has a more in-depth set of offerings and a more elegant strategy and vision for providing a dynamic information environment than its competitors. None of the other system vendors have made the strides, or the investments, that IBM has.

...Because of its size and breadth, IBM uniquely has all of the pieces, and also has a vast information infrastructure of its own to build and manage. IBM often uses its internal systems to showcase new capabilities, as shown in these examples:

• In an early cloud computing production pilot, IBM was able to reduce costs by managing more than 92,000 worldwide users with one storage cloud and one delivery team. Lessons learned from this deployment helped IBM establish cloud computing requirements for today’s products and services.
  
• In 2009, IBM deployed a unified, centralized customer support portal for all technical support tools and information. The portal unifies all IBM systems, software, and services support sites, including those from recent acquisitions. By leveraging its own portal, database, and storage technology, IBM was able to consolidate multiple support sites into a single portal. The new portal dramatically simplifies the user experience for clients with multiple IBM products, while helping IBM control infrastructure costs.
  

...a key difference between IBM and EMC is IBM’s orientation to total-solution provisioning, not just for one application at a time, but for the entire set of infrastructure needs that customers have. To ensure this, a clearly articulated strategy and vision keeps IBM’s focus on the bigger picture as it addresses each customer’s requirements.

...Efforts tied to cloud computing have helped vendor organizations to work together better toward composite and integrated solutions, but the vague specifications and lack of immediate revenue keep most vendor sales organizations focused on their respective products. The only other way to address the challenges of integrating people and technology as described above is to put a clear strategy in place with specific tactical goals and objectives. This is where IBM leads the industry in making demonstrable progress in building solutions that achieve the goals of its dynamic infrastructure model and strategy.

...IBM is in a unique position to deliver and support the full information infrastructure “stack” and address all of its clients’ information-centric challenges. The combination of IBM’s storage technology, information management products, aggressive financing, and best-of-breed integrated services supported by world-class expertise and proven experience, provide the building blocks for the world’s strongest information infrastructure portfolio.

Mr. Allen also discusses the successes of two real client examples, Virginia Commonwealth University Health Systems (VCUHS), and INTTRA, the largest multi-carrier e-commerce platform for the ocean shipping industry.

To read the entire paper, its available from IBM here:
White Paper: Creating a Dynamic Information Infrastructure.

technorati tags: IBM, EMC, Bruce Allen, , VCUHS, INTTRA