Disaster recovery unit takes aim at IBM
677403
NEW YORK (CBS.MW) - When companies spin off units, it&#39;s often a way to shed underperforming assets and move on. Free! Sign up here to receive our Internet Daily e-Newsletter!
599414
It&#39;s been a bit more than two years since Ambuj Goyal launched IBM&#39;s Information on Demand strategy, an effort by the company to bring together a virtual menagerie of data management, access, and analysis software under a single heading.Goyal, general manager of information management in IBM&#39;s Software Group, has driven the effort partly through a seemingly relentless series of acquisitions.One of IBM&#39;s highest-profile grabs is undoubtedly its&#160;pending deal to purchase business intelligence vendor Cognos for $5 billion. It&#39;s also bought niche companies such as&#160;Solid Information Technology, a company that makes an in-memory database, and&#160;Princeton Softech, a data archiving firm.A central pillar in the strategy is IBM&#39;s Information Server, released in October. It is an integration platform for combining data from a variety of heterogenous sources.The company has yet to develop its own packaged enterprise applications, choosing to tackle that lucrative business through partnerships. Instead, IBM&#39;s goal is to become the leading supplier of a data infrastructure designed to make those applications more effective.IBM&#39;s core target remains large enterprises faced with an avalanche of business data, and there is plenty of opportunity here, according to IT analyst Judith Hurwitz: &quot;I think we&#39;re just scratching the surface of what companies want to do.&quot;For example, she said, &quot;Companies have to do [RFID tags] because companies like Wal-Mart insist upon it. They&#39;ve got all this RFID data, and they&#39;re not doing anything with it. The question is, is there a way they can actually start using that RFID data to make better business decisions?&quot;Goyal and his teams might tell you that they&#39;re trying their best to answer that question. In a recent interview at IBM&#39;s Somers, New York, facility, the executive painted his IOD strategy as a roaring success, yet one still in its earliest stages.IDGNS: From a business standpoint, how has the Information on Demand strategy played out so far?Goyal: It couldn&#39;t be better. The success ... has helped not only the information management software, but the Software Group and IBM as a company.... The Cognos acquisition alone is $5 billion. We would not be allowed to do that, the shareholders and board would not allow us to do that, unless we had made a return on our investment.IDGNS: You&#39;ve assembled a dramatic array of data-centric technologies but still aren&#39;t in the packaged ERP, CRM application business. Why?Goyal: Our strategy remains that we are not in the ERP, CRM space. We are not in the applications business, of that kind. There is the market for automation and the market for optimization. Automation is about having an application agenda. I either build custom applications with COBOL or Java, or I do packaged applications, or I do [service-oriented architecture] to say, &#39;I already have applications, let me get a combined application or composite application.&#39;That&#39;s a market for consolidation now. That&#39;s not where the growth is. What a lot of people are saying now is, &#39;Hey I&#39;ve automated the call center, can I improve my per-customer profitability?&#39; It&#39;s not about automation, it&#39;s about optimizing my business, and that&#39;s all about leveraging information.Even in China, the automation market is saturated. Everywhere, we are seeing the automation market is saturating. There are a lot of projects going on in automation, don&#39;t get me wrong. But in that market, people have made their decisions. Now people are saying, how can I optimize?We don&#39;t do supply chain software, but we make supply chain software better. We don&#39;t do core banking, but we make core banking better. That&#39;s the optimization market. It&#39;s a multi-tens-of-billions-of-dollars&#39; worth of market. That&#39;s where the world is starting to go.IDGNS: So who are you competing with?Goyal: It&#39;s not who, but what segment. All these companies have become very, very big. When we work with HP, some of IBM&#39;s business provides services and software on HP&#39;s hardware, and our hardware business competes with HP. Same thing with databases: We fight against Oracle. But when we work with Siebel and Peoplesoft, we work with Oracle.IDGNS:&#160;Microsoft just made an offer for Fast Search and Transfer, a high-end, pureplay enterprise search vendor. They clearly see it as a growth business. How important is search within the IOD strategy?Goyal: Search to me is an ingredient technology. People don&#39;t buy search. People buy improved interaction with a client. [Search] is an ingredient technology that helps me solve a particular problem. People tell me Yahoo and Google are in the search business. They&#39;re not, they&#39;re in the advertising business. Search is just an ingredient technology that they use. With everything we do in Information on Demand ... search will be one of the ingredient technologies to leverage structured information and unstructured information.IDGNS: Are you done buying companies?Goyal: If history is an indication of what we have done over the past seven years, we can predict the future. You can answer your own question as to whether I&#39;m done buying companies.We are now in the optimization space, where two decades ago the world was in the automation space. When JD Edwards came out, when the first sense of ERP started to emerge, and so on.We feel from a basic truth perspective we are in the best position. We now have information integration, master data management, we have BI, data warehousing, databases, content management, we have search.But the journey of optimization has just begun. It will take us in ways we don&#39;t understand, even today. We are going after information on demand in real time. Sub-second, sub-millisecond response times to a question asked in a call center and delivering information just in time to optimize a business process or a human decision. So this is a two-decade journey.
590581
Here's a PC fix-it company that enjoys the challenge of helping panic-stricken technophobes on the verge of a computer crisis.
348814
It may be too early to talk plug-and-play but IBM Corp. believes it can help businesses of all sizes easily cluster their servers to handle intensive computing workloads.
755971
LIVE WEBCAST(Source: Symantec)  The lynch pin of a successful Business Continuity effort is a complete Disaster Recovery (DR) capability, the ability to quickly resume IT operations at a geographically remote location when needed. Symantec recognizes these obstacles and has built flexible cluster configurations and non-disruptive DR testing capabilities into its industry leading clustering technology, Veritas Cluster Server, that will enable customers to not only have a robust and cost effective HA/DR but also test their DR plans at times convenient to the data center team and in a way that won't impact production environments.
986
While many companies compete in the IT security business, IBM is differentiating itself by going beyond the worm of the day to include peripheral threats to a company&#39;s IT environment.
544645
IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Bristol West Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: BRW) has built a storage area network (SAN) using powerful disk, virtualization and software technologies from IBM to increase data availability, reduce costs and maintain consistent disaster recovery operations.
298503
Which companies have the best shot at recovery?
10853
IBM's Andy Monshaw, general manager of Storage Systems, is convinced of two things: his company will overtake EMC in storage sales and the future of external storage lies in consolidation via virtualization.
349366
IBM has issued an upgrade of its WebSphere middleware product, adding autonomic troubleshooting capabilities that autmatically detects system problems and recovers Web-based business transactions that would take days to fix manually.
699857
IBM&#39;s Global Services division Thursday announced the formation of a management practice to help customers implement service-oriented architectures.
372831
Many organizations allocate large resources to implement and deploy packaged ERP, CRM and SCM applications. Now these organizations need to move away from operational efficiency gains achieved and into leveraging their data for performance management and business intelligence.
286070
The first major release of IBM WebSphere in two years offers self-healing capabilities to provide failover for business transactions conducted via the Internet.
55827
IBM and top scientific research  organizations are joining forces in a humanitarian effort to  tap the unused power of millions of computers and help solve  complex social problems.
69139
New York: The US-based software major IBM, along with representatives of the world&#39;s leading science, education and philanthropic outfits, has launched a global effort aimed at harnessing the vast computing power of individuals and business computers and
575722
IBM is realigning elements of its sales organization to better reach small-to-medium-sized businesses.
674275
Storage and software company declares turnaround and sets new goals after years of financial troubles.