On Friday, IBM’s Bill O’Connell came to the BBBT. His updates on the IBM Data Warehouse strategy were detailed and impressive. Richard Hackathorn, one of my fellow BBBTers, did an excellent job of reviewing the overall IBM strategy and messaging with his blog posting.
Big Data Strategy
Looking at what IBM has announced and planned ( …unfortunately we couldn’t share/blog/tweet everything… ); IBM has a strategy that is directly aimed at being able to handle the largest scale data challenges and having those capabilities fuel solutions in other areas. Much like auto makers use their experiences in competitive racing series like F1 and NASCAR to bring innovation and tested technologies to their production lineups; IBM appears dedicated to aligning their wide range of products to solving these “big data” issues well and seeing how those innovations enable “smaller” data industries/problems.
Yet, IBM is not looking at their innovations simply from a product perspective, but rather a whole solution view. It is not enough for them to just bring the tools, but they are looking to make the solutions easier for their customers with best practice guidance over and above “simple” consulting.
NOTE – Merv Adrian, another fellow BBBTer, has an excellent look at the explosion of big data requirements for DBMS with Richard Winter in IBM’s Data Management Magazine.
Telecommunications Take
IBM’s strategy, both current and future, looks to solve some of the core issues for telecommunications organizations. The twin challenges of big ( …and ever growing… ) data requirements and time to implementation pressures pose issues both to telecom IT departments and their business stakeholder counterparts.
For telecom IT departments, IBM Data Warehousing should provide the ability to ingest and process the huge amounts of data that today’s Tier 1 telecoms have available from their operations. And as the continued move from transmission-based products to IP-based products continues to grow, this requirement will only continue to get bigger.
For telecom business execs and management, IBM is bringing the ability to analyze these huge data sets. Described as “pushing rope uphill”, bringing multi-faceted analytics from these big data sets could be the difference between leading with telecom analytical practices or following those who can make the timely and economical implementation of those analytics possible.
