The five technologies IBM is putting its money in

Craig Symons

A recent cover article in InformationWeek magazine contained a paragraph of note for all IT executives. While most analyst firms, including Giga, offer their perspective on key technology trends, it might also be valuable to examine where a large technology vendor like IBM is spending its money. In 2001, IBM spent $5.3 billion on research and development, by any measure a lot of money. Where is this money going?

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of technology and strategy for IBM’s server group, articulated five key technology initiatives that IBM is investing in:

1. Utility computing: The ability to buy capacity as needed. A company using this method would run its applications on a utility computing vendor’s site. CPU, storage and network capacity would be bought as needed in return for a monthly invoice, just like an electric bill.

The company only pays for what it uses and incremental capacity is available instantaneously if needed. With technology becoming more of a commodity and IT system outages getting more expensive, utility computing is a way for a company to share risks while lowering its costs.

2. Autonomic computing: Computer systems that regulate themselves much in the same way our autonomic nervous system regulates and protects our bodies. Some components of this technology are already up and running. However, complete autonomic systems do not yet exist.

It’s a radical change in the way businesses, academia and even the government design, develop, manage and maintain computer systems. Autonomic computing calls for a whole new area of study and a whole new way of conducting business.

3. Grid computing: A grid is a collection of distributed computing resources available over a local or wide area network that appear to an end user or application as one large virtual computing system. The vision is to create virtual dynamic organizations through secure, coordinated resource sharing among individuals, institutions and resources.

Grid computing is an approach to distributed computing that spans not only locations but also organizations, machine architectures and software boundaries to provide unlimited power, collaboration and information access to everyone connected to a grid.

4. Linux: This category speaks for itself. IBM has been leading the charge towards Linux and has made significant investments to date (in excess of $1 billion). Numerous Giga research on this subject is available.

5. Web Services: This is another category that speaks for itself. This is not so much a trend as it is a stampede. Nevertheless, Web Services will play a key role in IBM’s future from both a product perspective and a services perspective. Again, a large amount of Giga research exists on this subject.

In some respects a number of these technologies are interrelated or complementary. Utility computing would be vastly aided if it were built upon autonomic computing. Likewise grid computing would be complementary to utility computing and enhanced if built upon autonomic principles.

During the next few years IBM will spend billions on these five initiatives. While it is entirely possible IBM is making the wrong bets, I would tend to give them the benefit of the doubt. The real key for Giga clients is how these initiatives will benefit them, what timeframes the technologies will be available in the marketplace, and how quickly will IBM want to recoup its investment – i.e. how much will it all cost?

Ongoing Giga research will attempt to answer these questions. The figure illustrates Giga’s estimate of how quickly these initiatives will be adopted.