IBM announced yesterday their Cloud Suites for the C-Suite. CRN also ran an article on it where they dive into the implications of it rather than the detail of “more than 100 offerings in the Cloud” that IBM delivers. I like the following quotes:
While CIOs and IT managers are often making cloud technology decisions, IBM is taking the position that C-level executives are increasingly adopting cloud applications for front-office tasks. When line-of-business executives have made those decisions in the past, such as when sales managers subscribe to Salesforce.com, they have often made an end-run around the IT department.
“We like to think we’re finally ending that,” said Marc Dietz, director of IBM’s SmartCloud Solutions portfolio, in an interview with CRN. He said the new Cloud Suite for the C-Suite is designed to encourage CIOs and line-of-business executives to work cooperatively when making cloud IT decisions.
Frankly, it’s a good position to take. IBM has worked with data center, back office, and executives in companies for a long time. They aren’t going to head down the large change path offered by Salesforce. They will want to work to manage the change across multiple entities while still getting results. That fits both IBM culture as well as a large set of cloud and non-cloud products they offer.
Shameless promotion, I’m quoted:
“IBM’s Social Media Analytics in the cloud focuses on what matters. It operates on the understanding that companies no longer control the conversation; they participate and influence,” said Michael Porter, principal of the portal and social practice at Perficient, a St. Louis-based IBM partner, in an email to CRN. “Social Media Analytics helps you understand what’s being said about you and when you should engage with key influencers. As a partner, we are now armed with the tools and technologies necessary to help our clients participate, engage and deliver.”
I firmly believe that in the social media world and to some extent the social networking world, things have changed and companies no longer have control over the message they used to have. That represents more of an opportunity than a drawback. What’s better, to sell 500,000 average widgets off an advertising campaign or to sell 10,000,000 awesome widgets from a variety of social media comments, tweets, reviews, etc. In some ways it focuses the company on what’s important, the end product or offering. We benefit. Companies benefit because they are stronger overall. Even marketing departments benefit because they are forced to really think through how to engage the right people at the right time. They must improve their ability to do their jobs and success in that field will translate to career success.
Now for my top three cloud based products I like in IBM:
- Marketing automation via Unica and Coremetrics. This is an obvious cloud / SaaS play and it can only get better
- Social Media Analytics. In my view the best announcement of the year when they moved this to the cloud
- SmartCloud for Social. Yes, social networking belongs in the cloud.
Now for my wishlist:
- Move WebSphere Portal to a true Cloud ready or SaaS solution. Portal relies on an LDAP and database in order to run. Installing using an IaaS or PaaS approach means you have to bring up LDAP and DB images. In a world where you have competitors like Amazon and Salesforce, why are you not confuring portal to use the user repositories and storage services provided by the like of Amazon EC2. Then I don’t have to create my own db for every instance.
- Move IBM Web Content Manager to the cloud. It’s the same thing as portal but it’s technically a separate product
- Move IBM Security Access Manager (ISAM and formerly TAM) to a true cloud solution. In some ways, Lighthouse has achieved this and frankly, IBM should buy them and just complete the process. Security is moving into a cloud with some on-prem model quickly.
