EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

(Click here to jump to the next part and read about how EMA selected its Top 3 products)

"Today, a dev team leveraging Kubernetes containers can get a cloud app up in minutes." This statement by Arvind Krishna, IBM’s GM for Hybrid Cloud, at the beginning of his InterConnect 2017 keynote should have received a lot more recognition than it did. This one sentence shows the fundamental shift in IBM’s strategy, away from the old Tivoli-centric IT ops company and toward a modern DevOps-focused organization that is looking for differentiation up the stack. Today’s IBM encourages developers to deploy entire application environments without IT administrators even being aware.

Serverless computing, containers, IoT, DevOps, mobile workspaces and of course hybrid cloud are all technologies -and of course excellent buzzwords- with immediate impact on your organization’s security. Each one of these technologies increases the speed and agility of corporate IT, enabling your company to beat the competition. As enterprise IT complexity is exploding, this year’s RSA Conference attracted over 400 exhibitors and 45,000 attendees which makes it one of the largest IT events of the year, even bigger than the 2016 Amazon Re:Invent show.

For two decades, IBM’s Power Systems family of high-performance servers has been considered the premier alternative to x86-based systems. Combining fast processing, high availability, and rapid scalability, Power Systems are optimized to support big data and cloud architectures. Popularly deployed to run IBM’s AIX and IBM i operating systems, the platform has seen stiff competition in recent years from x86-based Linux systems. In 2013, IBM responded to this challenge by investing a billion dollars into the development of enhancements to the Power line that would support Linux operating systems and open source technologies. This bold move was hailed as a strategy that would greatly improve the attractiveness of the platform and drive broader adoption.