ORLANDO, USA: In an exclusive interview with CIOL on the sidelines of IBM Pulse 2008 conference, held recently at Orlando, Florida, Steve Mills, senior vice president, IBM Software Group, talks about the event, IBM's focus on the Greener World and IBM's various solutions.

Excerpts:

CIOL: What are the highlights of the Pulse 2008 event?
Steve Mills: Pulse 2008 was a bell weather event for us. We had lot of elements to offer through multiple events at the conference. The major focus was on companies that went into mergers and acquisitions, and the ones that focused on enterprise asset management (EAM). We brought together customers and partners on a single platform and have been able to connect the pieces through presentations, customer testimonials, customer sessions and demonstrations. But the highlight of the event was 'software for a greener world'.

And, why do we stand tall is that we really do have the industry's complete portfolio  to achieve Visibility, Control and Automation. Saying that, our perspective is that it is more than just traditional IT-related assets that the industry refers to as systems management. It has taken a much wider definition - like the infrastructure management.

Here, the infrastructure includes all of the connectivity – wireless and wired communication, as well as all the non-traditional IT assets that can be monitored and managed and put in a better order so that the complete end-to-end capability, as illustrated during one of the sessions at the event, has made Pulse 2008 even more unique among all the events that have happened in the past.  

CIOL: Tell us more about the 'software for a greener world'? 
SM: People think about energy consumption starting with physical things in this world – the car we drive, the bulb we glow etc. But the picture is really big and the software helps in managing these physical things. You can look at the energy consumption hot spots and manage it more effectively through this software. This is one of the important aspects of what the software does to monitor a physical environment. It goes beyond that. It is what the software can do to make people more efficient. It makes your environment more efficient. You can consume less storage and server space and you can operate with fewer people.

Most people have approached this issue with the context of labour saving, but there is a corresponding association with energy consumption and the idea of corporate footprint that the software plays a major role in it. This was the key significant picture that we aimed at driving at this event.