IBM Corp’s chief has told investors the company is counting on cloud computing to see it through its next phase of growth.
In an upbeat letter to shareholders, chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano outlined how the company would develop smart, digitally aware, networked and intelligent systems with pervasive instrumentation and interconnection, as well as build out cloud computing services.
Together they will help make business more efficient, and allow IBM to maintain its growth during the recession. “We see improved productivity, efficiency, responsiveness, profitability and societal benefit, the IBM leader said in the company’s Annual Review.
The digital infrastructure of the world was merging with the physical infrastructure of the world he said, and that was creating a new platform for the global economy and society. “We are now living in a world that is instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. We now have the computing power, advanced analytics and new computing models (such as “cloud”) to make sense of the world’s digital knowledge and pulse.”
Talking to Computer Business Review last month, Willy Chiu, VP for IBM Cloud Labs explained that IBM has around 8 million square foot of data centre resources to draw on around the globe.
Chiu described how the company is working to be able to string them all together through virtualisation and cloud-based provisioning so as to be able to dynamically manage business services. “Ultimately, it’s all about changing the economics of enterprise computing. It’s all about boosting efficiency. And it’s about doing more with less.”
The goal is virtualisation across all platforms, and a dynamic cloud-based computing infrastructure.
The move to cloud will be evolutionary Chiu said, but eventually it will take businesses to a point where they can start to marshal all the technology resources they need at any one time, without always having to make huge capital investments.
