IBM's Smarter Storage Solutions

When you notice your hard drive is about to become 100 percent capacity you always run around in circles and feel you're about to lose it. Now just imagine that same time when you tried to partition  your drives the first time you bought your laptop or desktop computer and looked helpless seeing it wasn't enough space you allocated for your files and you can't do anything about it and had no where else to back up files. Your pathetic attempt to put everything on USB drives and DVD was laughed upon by your peers because they know it would take you hours upon hours to do that and make it one of the most unproductive days at work. Your network administrator suddenly took out the whole network down so he can backup your office files and you go way past your deadlines, truly not a fun situation to be in.

All along, it should have been an enterprise level system that should have handled all of these for you. IBM as part of their smart computing initiatives, announced a new approach in planning, designing and managing big data infrastructures that utilizes their energy efficient, smart and intelligent software and hardware storage solutions that minimizes legwork in strategical ergonomic processes. Seen in the photo above, Jeff Barber, the Vice President for Mid Range Storage, Systems and Technology Group for IBM explains that the data we are gathering from an enterprise and corporate standpoint are increasing exponentially. The Asean region alone utilizes a huge chunk of these storage requirements and the only way you can cope up with this is by smart systems that has the intelligence and efficiency of handling this big data. We were shocked to see the numbers but it looks like they've got that covered. With things that can understand and automatically manage your data for you even in several brands that would normally not work together, the IBM Smarter Storage can run with your evolving infrastructures which even in some way future proof your systems. Now isn't that smart? 

If you know about Watson and the wonderful things he did for championing Jeopardy, that's exactly what they are going to be implementing in these storage systems. The proper management of data via virtualization, de-duplication, automated (even multilevel) tiering and cataloging can't be done by other known systems but IBM has that on their sleeve. You should check out these services that can complement your existing storage systems and have that enhanced via Intelligent Storage Service Catalog (ISSC) and utilize Cloud Systems (which in my books is inevitable) via IBM SmartCloud Services for Storage that can improve your data backup, manage massive quantities of data even in real time. 

Check out what they can offer over at http://www.ibm.com/storage or follow them on Twitter @IBMStorage for more information.

IBM Philippines

IBM: On Smarter Financial Decisions and Analytics

 Mr David Parmenter and Patrizio Calitri

It is a complex and difficult world to actually tackle yet it is VERY essential to a company's operations. Now that the country is bullish and the economy has got recent upgrades from financial entities, it is time to take care of it and analyze risks - whilst doing the legwork on future-perfect goals for your brand.

The Chief Financial Officer is now more than ever important to hone the landscape of the Philippine organizations and the economy. Each corp's capability to adapt and plan ahead sparks so many opportunities to earn and learn. We were invited a few days ago over lunch and a media briefing about the IBM Finance Forum where kiwi based best selling author and consultant David Parmenter and IBM's own Business Unit Executive Patrizio Calitri talked about key performance indexes and how to make smarter financial decisions through the application of analytics.

IBM Smarter Analytics offer several solutions that can help manage events, gather insights so you can outperform the competition. Managers these days somehow have common functions as CFO's and if you think about it they are naturally the end persons to implement whatever the executive decides upon. IBM Analytics was designed to increase collaborations and simply make such system work with each other faster and easier. It follows 3 particular elements namely time, control and confidence so it could add value in an organization. It might look too simple but if you perfect these functions well upon first salvo then you'll have better chances to achieve the goal of making your whole organization work together. This was one of the points raised by Patrizio Calitri early on who's not new to IBM's business analytics.  

Having your people work with these tools would make them consolidate elements of your corporation very quickly. It's one of the ways how technology is used at an advantage to create a more adaptive way of planning which is important to any entity. In exemplar, we probably are used to having all our plans set for the fiscal year when budgets are planned and given a set amount of things that you plan to do the whole duration. The things is, these things change and if you do not have it on your plans then you'll end up like a duck with its head chopped off. Pardon the comparison but I have seen this happen to the biggest corporations. If you implement something set on a fiscal year, you'll be on constraints with money, manpower and you wouldn't be able to delegate it on other entities in your structure because they probably have the same allotted limitations. Corporations should try and practice "adapting"; like making a quarterly or monthly plan that can change with the time. In this sense, you would easily make headway automating processes, increase your organizations agility if change is needed and make it better for everyone to gain new insight. You need this to simply plan ahead for your business. It is important to achieve analytical insight so you can paint the whole picture. Having something like performance narrative gives a clear structure to the organization and this way you can gain consensus on a plan and execute. This goes the same with your on going reports and analysis since it applies to that as well.The process entails gathering of financial and performance data of your manpower, having the right disclosures, the capability to review, edit, approve and certify, so you can easily publish the data to shareholders and regulators alike. Admittedly we spend close to 77% of our operations in manual preparation of reports so making errors are quite expected. IBM Analytics knows how to handle this and make you start to reduce risks of error via automation through software, minimize insider leaks and eliminate late filings of reports.

They use IBM Cognos TM1 Software which can produce on-demand enterprise planning software for budgeting, forecasting and data analysis. They can design this to work in various ways that would be applicable for you and your business. IBM makes sure your analytics goes personal because this tool is configurable. It's capability to adapt to the set data and have it produce customized results would make your business better understand the things to analyze. You'll have the power to produce rapid development and deployment of flexible products, including profitability data essential for your business' growth. It's so cool to have IBM share this opportunities to the Philippines; congratulations on your 75th year of operations in our country!

David Parmenter dubbed as the "King of KPI's" also discussed a bit about how important it is to measure, monitor and change performance. He also dispels myths about having these numbers depict performance related bonuses and in turn have people do well at work. There is no truth that this apparently works and there are certain flaws in this methodology. We've seen this happen most of the time in our own backyards and yet to find something that would exactly work for our businesses in general. KPI's should be measured 24/7 he laments and should be non financial in nature. It was so astounding to have a great mind tell that particular fact because I felt we were doing these things at work now. There should probably be a change in culture and how we do things to measure this. We would love to expound on this soon. You can take a look at his great work over at http://davidparmenter.com and it'll change the way you see these numbers. It made me realize a couple of things and I'd probably implement one or more changes for the people I manage where I work. It was a pleasure meeting someone so gifted as he is. We definitely learned a lot and we'll have this information utilized in IBM's goal of a smarter Philippines and a smarter planet!

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Simplify Computing: IBM PureSystems

Mr. Scott Firth, Director for Systems Software Marketing and IBM Virtualization shows the next era of IT through IBM PureSystems.

Last night while I was writing this article I was thinking of something complicated to press on the keyboard because this was a pretty technical discussion. I guess I was missing the point right from the beginning; because in a nutshell IBM is making things simpler. 

Running any IT infrastructure would require a lot of resources. Software, hardware components plus virtual storage through clouds and other media. This entails a lot of money and corporations; no matter how big or small they are, need all the help they can get. IBM knows this and they are rolling out a new, simpler era of computing via their new "expert integrated systems" which would make life easier for you and me. This would integrate all IT elements, both physical and virtual. This is a new enterprise computing model which would simplify and minimize resources needed to set up and maintain whilst running your businesses. 70 percent or more of budget allowances go to this particular function. Imagine how much that would cost in a larger scale. This is where IBM PureSystems come in.

Karl Wee Lead of Strategic Business IBM Asean Software Group, Scott Firth Director for Systems Software Marketing and IBM Virtualization and Sang Yoong Yi Country Manager for IBM Systems and Technology Group answering questions from the press.

IBM invested around $2 Billion for R&D and acquisitions over four years in order to achieve this feat. Imagine a world where key functions no longer need to be done over and over again. It is possible now by merely simplifying these processes with actual software that contains these things; in which some are free and some can be purchased much like an in house "conceptual app store" for IBM. You can literally make things work in minutes, often out of the box.

The new PureSystems family boasts of three advances in managing IT infrastructures.

“Scale-In” System Design: With PureSystems, IBM is introducing a new concept in system design that integrates the server, storage, and networking into a highly automated, simple-to-manage machine. Scale-in design provides for increased density – PureSystems can handle twice as many applications compared to some IBM systems, doubling the computing power per square foot of data center space.

Patterns of Expertise: For the first time, IBM is embedding technology and industry expertise through first-of-a-kind software that allows the systems to automatically handle basic, time-consuming tasks such as configuration, upgrades, and application requirements.

Cloud Ready integration: Out of the box, all PureSystems family members are built for the cloud, enabling corporations to quickly create private, self-service cloud offerings that can scale up and down automatically.

This has in effect changed a lot in the computing landscape. With its thrust also touching on cloud technology and using that platform to generally also simplify processes, this would be something that ordinary people can actually use to maintain resources. Later on, they could make data accessible to any place and have it with the right amount of security too. When asked about other vendors selling hardware/software components similar to PureSystems, Scott Firth and Karl Wee affirms IBM is different because they have a more wholistic package. It's a tougher cookie to bite these days but the selling point is indeed the convenience in setting it up and maintaining it with a single press of a button using the right software/applications. In the long run, this is pretty good investment and can save enterprise/corporations millions of dollars.

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