IBM Expands Resources For ISVs
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As part of its ongoing effort to foster third-party application development for its hardware and software businesses, IBM on Monday unveiled resources in its Virtual Innovation Center aimed
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The approach will vastly improve performance for applications that need to move large amounts of graphic data, such as networking and multimedia, IBM says.
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IBM is aggressively expanding its security portfolio in hopes of becoming the de facto source of advice and technology for businesses looking to adopt high-level IT governance and risk management strategies -- a transformation among customers that officials at Big Blue cite as both ongoing and inevitable.As the waves of security threats and data management regulations have washed ashore and left organizations struggling to balance perimeter and internal security concerns with mounting obligations to protect highly-valuable data, companies are being forced to take more of a top-down approach that addresses broad sets of IT-oriented risks, versus individual problems, IBM officials maintain.And while a host of players ranging from security software makers to massive IT consultants have begun marketing themselves as those best suited to help customers embrace a governance and risk management approach, IBM executives claim that their firm's mix of technology, services and partnerships place it at the top of any list of providers capable of helping organizations prepare their security operations for the future."We feel that we're ahead of the curve and driving forward our ability to meet these needs, some of which that might not yet have emerged from a broad perspective," said Kris Lovejoy, IBM's director of corporate security strategy."We feel that we are creating security risk management capabilities and have an opportunity to commoditize them in a way that can be leveraged at large," she said. "From an overall strategic perspective, that doesn't mean that customers are ready to stand up en masse right now and require everything we've built, but we're actively trying to extend the portfolio in advance of that trend."Industry specialists, including Symantec and McAfee, the world's two largest security software makers, have also adopted high-level product and marketing efforts meant to help customers move away from battling individual threats and compliance regulations in favor of a more generic risk management strategy, but IBM claims that it is better positioned to help customers move in that direction today.While the traditional security vendors have long been focused on shipping products that address various elements of end-to-end security and have only moved into risk management in the last two years, Big Blue has its own products and services as well as partnerships with those very vendors and many others that give it an upper hand, IBM executives said."In a sense, today, security is like a car without a steering wheel, and we think we're the only vendor who has the right abilities across all the involved domains that can drive change across business processes," said Eric McNeil, manager of corporate security strategy at IBM. "These other companies touch on a lot of domains, but we're the only ones who have all the pieces that span identity, applications security, physical security, and asset lifecycle management."With its broad array of product and services skills, the executives said that IBM is best qualified to pull together key components that will allow more organizations to manage security using analytical reporting, policy creation and enforcement, and through the use of risk analysis dashboards.The executives cite two areas, IT service management and master data management, as tremendously important to its ability to aid customers in addressing risk. To be able to build controls to oversee change and configuration issues on the services side and help companies get their heads around the intricacies of master data management, customers will need more than the traditional security vendors can offer, said Lovejoy."The security companies of the future are not the companies that offer capabilities for the newest bells and whistles, it's about those things and more, including all the plumbing needed to make these strategies work," said Lovejoy. "While traditional security players that off threat management have great benefits in securing a perimeter, they're not adept at installation of basic plumbing, which actually helps in managing the majority of the risk."Partners fret about potential downgrades Throughout its Global Technology Services unit and IBM software group, including its Tivoli product lines, Big Blue officials contend that the company is far better suited to handle configuration and change management around complex issues like employee identity.Top executives at Symantec and McAfee concede that IBM enjoys a unique position in the security sector based on the breadth of its products and partnerships and its huge services delivery capabilities.And while the CEOs of both companies first point out that they consider IBM as one of their closest and most important partners, respectively, they maintain that they too have strengths in IT governance and risk management that will continue to distinguish them from the technology giant.They also said that IBM will have to resist the urge to promote its own security technologies at the expense of providing customers with best-of-breed technology."They're a different beast than us because they play such a big services integration game up and down the IT stack, but it does seem sometimes that everything does look 'blue' to them," said David DeWalt, chief executive at McAfee. "We're not looking to compete with them, and there's not a lot of overlap, so the idea will be to continue to partner where we can."While recognizing that his company partners with IBM around the globe and that he considers it extremely valuable to continue to do so, John Thompson, chief executive at Symantec, said that there are concerns about IBM giving preference to its in-house technologies.Prior to joining Symantec nine years ago, Thompson served in the role of general manager of IBM Americas and a member of the company's Worldwide Management Council."The issue in terms of our relationship with IBM is if they will continue to be open to technologies that come from outside their own software group, or will they have a strategy as has been articulated as 'blue on blue,' or IBM services packaged around IBM software," Thompson said. "To the extent that they bias their engagements that way, they might limit their ability to compete, and it is clear that they have an institutional bias if you look at some of the things that we have observed on the marketplace."Responding to those comments, IBM's Lovejoy said that while IBM has continued to make investments in expanding its security product portfolio -- most notably via the acquisition of Internet Security Systems for $1.3 billion in August 2006 -- that it will continue to foster a best-of-breed approach using its partners to ensure it meets its customers' needs.She also noted that IBM's services business would never have grown to become over half of the company's annual revenue without a "vendor agnostic" approach.Industry experts said that IBM and its security partners are likely to compete more frequently as the company acquires additional products and its rivals build out their services and risk management capabilities.However, said Paul Stamp, analyst with Forrester Research, all the involved parties likely have too much riding on their existing partnerships for any competitive ill will to affect their relationships."There will be competition, but I think that IBM sees this risk management issue as going far beyond what we consider traditional security, they are looking more at setting policies and security within a larger IT management framework that includes performance management, data governance and overall business services issues," said Stamp."If anything I think Symantec will compete with them more in some areas, and there will be areas where [Symantec] has some individual strengths, but these companies all need to partner," he said. "You also have to remember that customers IT shops aren't monolithic, and each company will continue to sell into different constituencies; in the end there should be room for everyone."
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BEA Systems on Monday is releasing a version of its application infrastructure suite designed to enable ISVs to deliver products for SOAs (service-oriented architectures).
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IBM shored up commitment to its mainframe computing platform Thursday with a series of new technologies, investments in emerging markets, new industry-focused solutions, and new partnerships.
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Big Blue is the latest to embrace iSCSI, a protocol increasingly being used to build low-cost storage area networks.
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IBM plans to expand the number of on-demand data centers it has from one to 11 by the end of the year. Users at the AFCOM data center conference in Atlanta had mixed views on the prospect of adopting an outsourcing model or pay-as-you-go pricing.
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In a move to modernize its venerable line of mainframe-based CICS middleware, IBM on Wednesday introduced an updated version of its CICS Transaction Server that enables corporate IT administrators to extend the product to work better with SOAs (service-oriented architectures) through Web services.
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Placing greater emphasis on availability than in any previous release of its software, IBM (Quote, Chart) released detailed enhancements to its core WebSphere Application Server (WAS).
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Q&amp;A: The development alliance will give both companies a broader reach in the marketplace, with the first offerings coming in early 2005, says Buell Duncan, IBM&#39;s general manager of ISV and developer relations.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems and IBM are expanding a cooperative support offering from the U.S. to 46 other markets. Through the offering, called Managed Maintenance Solutions (MMS) for Cisco Products, enterprises that use IBM as a systems integrator can get Cisco technical support by calling IBM. It is designed to simplify IT administrators' jobs and prevent them from having to choose between turning to Cisco or IBM for help, said Cisco spokeswoman Mandy Knotts. Cisco has a worldwide technical support organization but is not a systems integrator. The companies began working together on support three years ago as part of the Cisco Global Services Alliance, Knotts said. Over time they developed the MMS offering, which so far has been available only in the U.S., Knotts said. It is now being expanded to markets in Europe and Asia, including the U.K., France, Germany, China, Australia, South Korea and India, as well as Canada. The expansion was set to be announced Monday. Customers with MMS can make all their calls for Cisco technical support through the IBM Technical Support Center, which can provide network specialists trained by Cisco. The service also includes escalation of issues to Cisco Technical Assistance, 24 hours a day and seven days a week, plus operating system updates and hardware replacement, according to Cisco. Â
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By Duncan Martell SAN FRANCISCO  - IBM is expanding and adding newtechnology to 11 of its data centers in North America, Europeand Asia to meet growing demand and rolled out new services tocustomers, the world's largest computer company said late onThursday.
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(InfoWorld) - IBMÂ is making another move to strengthen ties with global IT startups and their venture capital backers, providing special access to the technical experts and products housed in IBM Innovation Centers. The vendor is due to make the announcement Thursday at its Venture Capital Symposium at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. The symposium brings together venture capitalists (VCs), the startups they fund, and IBM staff. IBM runs 32 Innovation Centers worldwide, offering training, testing and support facilities for the company's partners and customers in relation to IBM hardware, software and services. The vendor has eight centers in the Americas, 18 in Europe and the Middle East, and six in Asia-Pacific, with the most recent opened in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. IBM plans to open its thirty-third Innovation Center in Dublin, Ireland, next week, according to Drew Clark, director of strategy for IBM's Venture Capital Group. The company will also open its European Venture Capital Center at the same time on the same site as the Dublin Innovation Center, he said. VC-backed startups gave IBM feedback that they wanted more access to the company's technologies, Clark said. The idea is to give the startups free access on the product side to emerging technologies such as IBM's blade servers and its Cell processor and to offer the companies ways to develop and test their software against IT set-ups that may not exist within their own regions. All the centers are linked via grid software so that once a developer's software has been uploaded to the IBM system in one location, it's easy to distribute to other centers. IBM can give startups free advice on how best to approach markets outside their home countries, for instance, how a company in China can sell its offerings in the U.S., Clark said. Startups also can talk to IBM's technical architects either face-to-face in the centers or remotely from their phones or computers to take advantage of their specific areas of expertise. What IBM gets out of theÂ tighter relationship with VC-backed startupsÂ is access to developing companies. "It's the sweet spot for IBM," Clark said. "It's early enough that we can have some influence over companies." IBM can encourage the startups to join its partner programs and to use more of its hardware, software and services. Another interesting benefit to IBM is seeing how different geographies adopt newer technologies. For instance, in China, the platform of choice to use Web 2.0 software like social networking, blogs and wikis is a mobile handset, not a PC running a Web browser as is the case in the U.S. "We can spot trends and understand very early on what the software's doing," Clark said. The early insight helps IBM get a better handle on which technologies it needs to make available to users in the future. "It's a very nice virtuous cycle," he added.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the industry's most comprehensive range of resources for business partners using open source technologies.
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IBM Tuesday will announce an expansion of its services for companies seeking help with radio frequency identification technology. Over the past several months, IBM has developed RFID services
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To make it more palatable for independent software vendors (define) to adopt BEA Systems&#39; (Quote, Chart) middleware software suite, the company released WebLogic Platform ISV Edition, an &quot;SOA in a box&quot; solution tailored to meet specific application
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IBM has unveiled virtual resources to help business partners more quickly build and deploy on-demand business applications tailored to customer requirements across all vertical industries.