IBM is seeking to break its conservative image with its Interconnect conference in Las Vegas.
Interconnect marks a number of firsts for IBM, including the first iteration of the conference itself. IBM has historically held smaller conferences built around individual technology areas, rather than big-tent events more akin to Oracle OpenWorld. The event in Las Vegas has attracted 21,000 attendees, according to IBM, over 40% of whom haven’t been to an IBM conference before.
InterConnect is an amalgamation of three formerly separate conferences: Pulse (which was for mobile development), Innovate (for development more broadly) and Impact (for cloud computing). IBM rented a full sized arena at the MGM Grand, a voluminous space that usually hosts acts like Fleetwood Mac and Barbra Streisand.
Interconnect also introduced clients to Robert LeBlanc, IBM’s new vice president for cloud operations.
Cloud importance
The cloud, and by extension LeBlanc, is vitally important for IBM, which has posted successively lower revenue for the past 11 quarters. IBM is making cloud computing a core element of its service portfolio, and it claims its cloud business grew 60% last year and brought in $7 billion (€6.2 billion) revenue.
LeBlanc worked hard to convince customers that moving to the cloud is the way to go. “If you don’t believe your industry is changing then you’d better step back and look what your competitors are doing,” he said.
“It’s much more fun to be the disruptor than the disrupted,” he said, urging the audience to think about how the cloud, data analysis, mobile computing and the Internet of Things could transform their businesses.
“LeBlanc delivered exactly what IBM needs in terms of explicating the company’s vision,” said Charles King, principal analyst for the analyst firm Pund-IT. “Far from the gauzy, amorphous claims that some other cloud vendors rely on, IBM is focusing instead on workable solutions and repeatable results.”
IBM brought a number of customers on stage to talk about how the cloud is improving their operations. Airbus is using an IBM service to get a better handle on the data coming from its aircraft, said Pascal Eymery[cq], a vice president with the aircraft maker.
Its systems keep tabs on more than 20,000 operational metrics for each flight, and its next generation of aircraft will provide over 400,000 metrics, or more than 18GB for each flight. That is a lot of data to ingest for every flight around the world, and Airbus will employ IBM’s cloud services for the task, Eymery said.
Pre-flight checks
Airbus wants to harness the data to automate some of the pre-flight checks maintenance crews perform between flights, as well as make better predictions about when to replace parts and do maintenance.
Because airlines make a profit of only $4 (€3.5) per passenger on average, any savings a supplier like Airbus can provide will give it an advantage, LeBlanc said.
Citigroup also feels the need for digital transformation. It opened a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow third-party programmers to use its digital wallet and other services in their own apps.
IBM introduced a number of new services at InterConnect to help developers build such applications. One, called DataWorks, prepares an organisation’s data for external use. An administrator can use DataWorks to specify which fields in a database are opened for access. The software can also clean up data and convert it into appropriate formats for public consumption.
IBM also announced a directory service for drawing data from external APIs, called API Harmony. A developer can enter a term into a search box, such as “restaurant reviews,” and the service will return a list of APIs, along with instructions on how to connect to them.
It will also release software for running IBM’s BlueMix services within an organisation’s own data centres. BlueMix provides functionality and tools for building cloud-based applications. It lets organisations move their data to the public cloud if their computational needs become too great, LeBlanc said.
Joab Jackson, IDG News Service
Ltd
