InformationWeek Stories by Bob Evans

InformationWeek Stories by Bob Evanshttp://www.informationweek.comInformationWeeken-usCopyright 2012, UBM LLC.2011-03-15T10:30:00ZGlobal CIO: My Farewell Column: 10 Big Things For CIOs To Think AboutYour humble columnist says goodbye and thanks, and poses 10 big questions today's CIOs need to answer.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229300888?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsAll good things come to an end, and so it is with the very great honor and privilege I've had to chat with you every day about the IT business and the CIO profession. This is my final column and I thank you heartily for all the ideas you've shared, the criticisms you've raised, and the lessons you've taught me. In this final column, I've compiled the 10 most important ideas and lessons that I've come across over the past 2-1/2 years in my engagement with you via Global CIO. I've discussed all of these at different times but feel that now's the ideal time to summarize the most-strategic and most-timely ideas toward which today's CIOs need to be devoting a great deal of time and thought. 1) The Power Of Transformation And Transformative Thinking As CIO, you're one of the few leaders who can not only see but understand at a gut level the entire range of end-to-end processes within your company. Are you making the most of that opportunity by pointing out sluggish approaches, wasted opportunities, and cost-sucking latency? Are you combining that unique perspective with your equally unique awareness of technology's capabilities to push your company beyond merely what is has been and toward what it must become? Would your peers inside your company and among your customers say you're a transformer—or would they say you're a preserver of the status quo? 2) What Business Are You In Today? Is Nike a sneaker company? A sports-apparel company? An athletic-equipment company? Or a lifestyle company? How about Amazon—what business is it in today? Or ESPN? As customers—both consumer and business—demand more from the companies they buy from, and as more transactions move online, and as collaboration obliterates traditional boundaries inside and outside our companies, businesses have to rapidly evolve their business models and their products and services relentlessly, and each of us needs to be equally relentless in asking, 'What business am I in today? What will my customers pay me for tomorrow that they won't pay me for today? Or what are they paying me for today that they won't pay me for next month?' As technology becomes the conduit through which almost all customer engagements and transactions occur, CIOs are in superb positions to help identify, quantify, and manage these new opportunities and possibilities. Are you helping your company think about—and act upon—the big question of what business you're in today? 3) Don't 'Align' With The Business; BE The Business We've all heard countless times the old bromide that tells us that "The CIO's job is to align IT with the business." In my opinion, that's one of the most deadly and damaging philosophies a CIO can embrace because at its very core it says that IT is not part of the business—it's some separate, detached, subservient, out-of-phase tag-along. It's also a philosophy that brands the CIO as a follower and not a leader, and that defines the IT organization as one that is passive and reactive rather than nimble and active and opportunistic. Of those two types, which do you think CEOs are going to favor in the high-velocity business world of today and tomorrow? 4) You Are NOT A 'Service Organization' Are you preserving the status quo or helping to create the future that will keep your company relevant, engaged, and successful? Do you sit back and wait for "the business" to decide what it wants to be, and then wait some more until they decide to tell you what you need to do to stay relevant? Do you accept that while you're a C-level executive, you're not quite as fully vested as the other C-level folks? Are you a business leader who happens to have superb technology insights, or are you a technology whiz who happens to have a fancy title? The companies that will win and thrive and grow and achieve in the next 5-10 years will be dependent on superb IT capabilities, and that means that the CIOs at those companies must be aggressive and assertive leaders, and not wallflowers who sit back and wait to be told what the folks at the big-kids table want them to do. 5) Are You Flipping The 80/20 Ratio? Because it'll kill you if you don't. Here' s why:Too many companies are still burning 70% or 75% or even 80% of their IT budget on maintenance and legacy anchors, leaving precious little for growth and innovation. CIOs who fail to take very aggressive and uncompromising steps to reverse that ratio are positioning themselves as drags on the organization, as impediments to progress, and as opponents of change and innovation and new and better ways of doing things. 6) CIO As Chief Acceleration Officer If you could go into your CEO's office and promise him that you could shorten product-development times, reduce days-of-inventory turns, accelerate deliveries to customers, cut or eliminate the wait-times customers endure on your support lines, and shorten your order-to-cash cycle, is there a CEO on planet Earth who wouldn't idolize you? So why not embrace that as a new mission for your IT organization and think of what you do as being the Chief Acceleration Officer who leads the company's efforts to do everything it does not just better but faster? Give the gift of speed, and see if anyone in your company or among your customers wants to return it. 7) Spend More Time With Customers I know, I know, your schedule's too tight to spend time with customers. Or you plan to do some of that next quarter or later this year. Or maybe you think it's not your job—that all that customer stuff is the responsibility of the sales organization. But unless you as CIO immerse yourself among your customers and feel their problems and their challenges and see their breakthroughs and their miracles, how can you know which IT strategies to advocate most aggressively? In the absence of that first-hand knowledge, aren't you then just relying on hearsay? And don't you then relegate yourself to being a follower who has to rely on what other people are telling you about what's going on out in the real world, versus being a leader who KNOWS first-hand what's going on and who's superbly positioned to trigger customer-centric innovations, opportunities, and revenue? 8) Mobilize The Enterprise I haven't met many people who've overestimated the pace at which mobility technology is turning our business world upside down, or who've overestimated the impact that smartphones and tablets and embedded intelligent devices will have on how the business world operates. But I've met LOTS of people who's said that they want to wait and see, or they're not sure if it's perhaps just a fad, or they want to wait until one dominant platform emerges, or they've got other priorities and mobility and wireless just don't measure up. . . . And I think that latter group is in for a world of hurt. I would urge you all to take out your mobile strategy plan, and then greatly accelerated (by 50% or more) every project and every deadline. That will be brutal and probably just about impossible to achieve—but just think how much more brutal it'll be if your existing competitors or some newfangled upstarts rush into the gap you're left for them, and turn your marketplace on its head because you didn't think the mobile revolution was really real, or urgent, or a top-level priority. 9) Do Your Peers View IT Expenses As Investments—Or As Overhead Costs? This has nothing to do with accounting or allocations or OpEx versus CapEx. Rather, it has to do with their trust in you, and your willingness and ability to articulate your vision to them with passion and sweeping knowledge of your customers and your business and your competition. Think about it: do you present budget proposals for IT, or budget proposals for growth and innovation and greater customer engagement made possible by IT? Do you give your peers—as well as people at all levels throughout the company—reason to believe that IT can make and is making a vast difference in their ability to shine in their individual jobs, and in the company's ability to thrive and grow and stand out among competitors? Or do you give them, directly or indirectly, reason to believe that IT is some crappy thing that should probably be shipped out to some company that can't do any worse but will do so for much less money? 10) Would You Want Your Son/Daughter To Work In Your Department? Ever thought about that? And what's your answer? How much responsibility do you, personally, take for your answer? Do you feel you're just a little pawn in the great game of life, or do you step forward and take ownership for whether you organization is customer-centered, forward-looking, bold and innovative, tolerant of risk, and fearless in your approach to priorities? Are you proud of the work you and your team do every day, proud of what you're achieving, proud of the innovations you're driving, proud of the culture you're building and fostering and enhancing? Are you proud enough that you'd want your son/daughter to work in the same environment as you do each day? And if you're not—well, what changes do you feel you'd need to make to change your mind? So that's my farewell list of things I hope you'll take some time to think about, because for all of the tumult and upheaval that IT has triggered in the past 10-15 years, I believe that the next few years will see a far greater impact as companies get closer to real-time operations with massively mobile workforces spending more time creating opportunities and less time battling through and over internal obstacles. It will be a riotous and exhilarating and unforgettable ride, and I hope you treasure it. And I thank you from the bottom of my heart for letting me tag along for this first leg of that journey. All the best! Cheers, Bob2011-03-11T14:00:00ZGlobal CIO: Saving Lives And Changing The World Via NPowerAbout 30 world-class CIOs and some top IT companies are helping nonprofits unleash the power of technology in partnership with a marvelous organization called NPower.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229300823?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsAnyone who thinks that CIOs are one-dimensional specialists whose dreams and visions don't extend outside the data center could learn a very great deal about life, commitment, vision, business, and giving back to our communities by getting to know NPower and its superstar roster of CIO supporters. Some of the world's most powerful CIOs are throwing their weight behind NPower, a national nonprofit that's connecting the disparate worlds of corporate IT prowess and untraditional tech trainees to deliver effective and affordable IT expertise to hundreds of nonprofits across the country. Along the way, Brooklyn-based NPower has been the catalyst for transforming the lives of almost 500 disadvantaged young adults through 22-week IT training classes that yield not only certifications from Microsoft and Cisco but also deep and hard-earned senses of achievement, purpose, dignity, and opportunity. Backed by primary support from Accenture, JPMorgan Chase, UBS, and other major corporations, NPower is now turning out about 100 graduates per year and says 87% of its graduates are now fully employed or attending college. I wanted to share the story of NPower's remarkable success—and its vast potential—because in our frantic world of work and family and kids' activities and always-on gadgets that sometimes make us wonder just who's the slave and who's the master, it serves as a reminder that compensation and ROI can take many forms. I also wanted to share the NPower story because as I drift into my dotage, I'm becoming more of a sentimental sap and, doggone it, this is just one of those feel-good stories about which lots of people need to learn because (a) it'll bring a smile to your face and (b) you just might decide you want to get involved in some way as well. JPMorgan Chase CIO Guy Chiarello is a long-time supporter and member of NPower's board, and at a recent NPower event I had the chance to chat with him, UBS group CIO Michele Trogni (also an NPower board member), Accenture managing director Chris Wearing (a founder and chairman of NPower), and NPower CEO Stephanie Cuskley. (For a great overview of NPower, check out <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULMZlD9Hvpg&feature=player_embedded">this video</a> featuring CEO Cuskley.) There was some talk of how public-cloud technology could be a driving force behind unleashing new productivity within nonprofits, and about the power of shared services and such, but most of the conversation centered not on technology transformation but on the transformation of young people who, were it not for the grace of God or NPower or both, might very well not be alive today. "Have you ever met somebody who rides the subway at night to sleep because they don't have a home?" Chiarello asked. "And who then shows up in a Fortune 100 company and has a technology job and a growing career?" With more than a touch of reverence in his voice as he spoke of his JPMC colleague who works in tech support, Chiarello added, "I've watched this woman since the day she came into the place—she can now compete with most of the new hires we bring in from a range of pretty impressive colleges. "When you see Darlene [the NPower graduate who had to sleep on the subways] and speak with her, you would think that that story was from some life from a hundred years ago rather than what it really was: from just three years ago." A few weeks after that conversation, I had the privilege to attend the graduation ceremony for NPower's most recent group of IT specialists, and I'd like to share with you a couple of their stories:Graduate Errold Augustine said that shortly after he enrolled in NPower's Technology Services Corps training program, he also took on an even more daunting challenge: "While at TSC, I took on the responsibility for raising my twin nephew and niece, and I had huge help from the TSC leaders. I don't know if I could have done it without them," said Errold after receiving his graduation certificate. Errold's now an intern at Hewitt Associates (he was also offered an internship at Deloitte), and also holds down a part-time IT position for the ACLU's New York office. AND he's pursuing graduate studies at Brooklyn College. AND he's still helping to raise is twin nephew and niece. Another graduate, Isiah Doctor, became a father during his 22-week training program and said, "NPower taught us that we have the power to turn our dreams into reality." Isiah's big dream that he plans to turn into a reality? He plans one day to have his own IT consulting company. Many of the other young folks told similarly inspiring stories, and they all seemed to buy unflinchingly into the bold expectations that Accenture's Wearing laid out for them. In his opening remarks at the graduation ceremony, Wearing said, "You came in with a common desire: to succeed and change the world. . . . For the 10 years we've had this program, every graduate says TSC has changed my life—and in return, all we ask of you is that after you graduate, you go out and change the world." Wearing also emphasized the importance of the broad and deep—and perhaps unprecedented—support from major IT companies that NPower has been able to pull together . And while Wearing didn't say so specifically, it's clear that Chiarello and Trogni and the other 30-35 world-class CIOs closely aligned with NPower have used some of their considerable leverage to encourage more than a dozen major IT firms to support NPower as well. Referring to NPower's unique and broad-based blend of IT supporters as "the ecumenical factor," Wearing said, "I think what's really differentiated here is that while there are lots of nonprofits in technology, there aren't any that have such deep-rooted affiliations with Accenture, and IBM, and Deloitte, and Cisco, and CSC, and others. "You look at the names of all the people coming to our annual gala and it's really a who's who—there are no other organizations that can count all those companies as core partners. And when you think that on top of that there's also the power of a JP Morgan and a UBS and the deep commitment of their CIOs, well, there isn't a problem with any nonprofit in the country that that team couldn't solve." Wearing, who speaks at ultra-high speed and with a smooth British accent, underscored how rare it is for big IT companies that battle against each other aggressively in the market to come together to serve a higher purpose such as that of NPower: "This power of competition coming together to solve these problems is key," he said at the graduation ceremony. "Let me put it this way: if I can spend four days every November celebrating Thanksgiving after having spent the first 40 years of my life in England, then I have no problem introducing the gentleman from Deloitte who is our next speaker." Chiarello said the CIOs supporting NPower's mission are able to offer opportunities for members of their management teams to get involved as well in what he called a self-sustaining effort. "All of a sudden you get this community," he said. "We have a community of senior technology leadership that's now bringing in the next layer—so a board member like Randy Cowen, who was the CIO of Goldman Sachs for many years, is a member of our board and spreads the good word. We've set up a CIO Council that will have 25-35 top CIOs and that will enable us to continue to spread the mission and the services." And that CIO network is indeed impressive—at the company's annual gala fundraising and recognition event, here's a partial list of the companies whose CIOs were in attendance: Avon, Blackstone, Bank of America, Booz Allen, Chubb, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Korn Ferry, NBA, NBC, New York Life, NYSE Euronext, Spencer Stuart, Verizon Wireless, and Xerox. I asked Chiarello what convinced him to support NPower so vigorously, and why he chose it from among the dozens or hundreds of groups that request his time and interest and advocacy. "For me, it was about leverage," he said. "I could help anybody in need across any non-profit sector by helping enable the technologies. And that could be anything: that could be enabling someone to raise money, to provide aid, to create foundations—it doesn't matter what the need was; we've structured a managed-services offering, and we've structured a software program and a services program to deliver services, in addition to the portal. "But for me personally the real appeal was leverage. What's the common theme? Technology expertise matched up with technology need really, in the end, delivers. And some of it is for-pay, and some of it is not for-pay. Volunteerism combined with the professional services and the product set really is an enabler." And while Chiarello emphasized that he feels that all manner of public-spirited volunteerism is a great thing, he was also quick to point out that IT leaders can have a disproportionately huge impact within the NPower model. "I'm not good at painting fences, or schools, or houses!" Chiarello said. "But when it comes to technology services, we all know they're pretty expensive and I could probably do a lot better in eight hours working on something like that instead of painting a fence. "And as I think about it, maybe that's the other key attraction: technologists can help people with technology problems and it really, really matters. We like to paint fences too, but we could get 10-fold the leverage if it's a technology problem because they could never get the talent that we hope to make available." In closing, a few more details about NPower: ** In the last few months, NPower's four charter underwriters (JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, UBS, and Accenture) have been joined by four additional national underwriters: Bank of America, CSC, Cisco, and Cognizant. **NPower's matchmaking portal is the enabling force behind its Community Corps, which provides the talents of skilled corporate IT volunteers to nonprofits in need, and the Corps is undergoing a major expansion that will allow the online platform, for the first time, to reach even more nonprofits including libraries, schools and NGOs. The expansion provides new features, enhanced user interfaces, and customizable program options, and is supported by a $500,000 pro bono donation from Accenture. Since its official launch in November, TCC has connected hundreds of IT volunteers and nonprofits and already has 150 pro bono IT projects in the works. **For more information, check out the <a href="http://www.npower.org/">NPower website</a>.2011-02-28T08:05:00ZGlobal CIO: iPad Versus Motorola Xoom: Apps Give Apple Huge AdvantageIn considering new Android and Blackberry tablets, CIOs need to focus on the numbers that matter: how many apps, and price of device.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229219465?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsLast week, I wrote about how the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229219030">massive gravitational attraction of Apple's iPad</a> tablet is sucking in huge numbers of enterprise applications that are giving Apple in aggregate an enormous advantage over future competitors from Android or RIM. Yes, those competitors are certainly working feverishly to persuade the makers of mainstream business apps to provide versions for their tablets as well as for the iPad, and those big software companies—as well as thousands of smaller ones as well—will certainly make Android and Blackberry Playbook versions available. For CIOs, the big question isn't whether or not they will do so; of course they will. No, the big question is when: when will CIOs be able to begin buying and staging and deploying those apps that unlock the true business value of these devices? Will those core enterprise apps be ready on the day these new tablets—most of which haven't even been released yet—are available for purchase? A month later? Three months? Six months? If we'd turn back the hands of time 25 years or so, we could say that as long as Lotus 1-2-3 were available, that would seal the deal—one superapp would cover most requirements and justify the purchase. But in today's high-pressure economic environment, CIOs must manage two different but equally intense priorities: first, leading the charge to mobilize the enterprise by giving hundreds or thousands of employees the mobile tools and solutions necessary to maximize revenue opportunities and enhance customer engagements. And second, ensuring that every dollar they spend on IT unlocks new potential and new business opportunities, with as few constraints as possible. In that context, I was a bit surprised at a recent analysis offered by the Wall Street Journal's superb Personal Technology columnist, Walt Mossberg. Under the headline "Motorola's Xoom Starts Tablet Wars With iPad," Mossberg described the capabilities of the new Motorola device and offered some head-to-head comparisons of it versus the iPad. But in my humble opinion, Mossberg missed the mark by a rather significant margin when he mostly dismissed the enormous competitive advantage held by Apple and the iPad in the AppStore where more than 60,000 iPad-specific apps are available, along with more than 300,000 that run on both the iPhone and iPad. Here's how Mossberg noted that vast disparity, lumping it into a series of descriptions of physical attributes as if the volume and quantity of available apps were just one more wonky feature in a checkbox comparison:"The iPad has way more tablet-specific apps—<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703775704576162434292664662.html">around 60,000 versus a handful</a>—and, in my tests, much better battery life. Plus, whatever the specs say, it's a fast device with a beautiful screen that delights people daily." Walt Mossberg has forgotten more about personal technology than I'll ever know, but his article falls short of meeting the information needs of CIOs precisely because it pays far too much attention to physical qualities that are nice but hardly strategic—"I found [Xoom] generally comfortable to hold, except when I was reading for long periods in vertical mode, where the long, thin shape and weight made it feel a bit unbalanced"—and not nearly enough to the stuff that really matters: what business apps are available right now, which ones will be ready for use in the next three months, and which ones will be unavailable for use for half a year or more? Then again, that's why Mossberg writes a column called "Personal Technology"—he's got huge following of all types but he focuses his work on how individual users will engage with new gadgets. And both the iPad and the Xoom will be used by many tens of millions of individuals. But many of those consumers are simultaneously business users, and in that alter ego the apps issue far outweighs technical details. As I wrote last week in the column mentioned above, called <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229219030">Global CIO: iPad Becoming Kingmaker For Enterprise Apps</a>: CIOs who think the Apple iPad is little more than a stranger in a strange land and will never blend into their Windows-centric environments might want to note that <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/technology/21tablet.html?_r=2">Citrix reports</a> that its iPad app that offers full access to Windows desktops has been downloaded more than 700,000 times. In more tangible terms, here's how that translates to innovation in the IT-rich world of healthcare, according to an <a href="http://www.itworld.com/security/136652/can-hps-webos-touchpad-gain-a-foothold-enterprise">ITworld.com article</a>: "Since Citrix virtual desktop solutions don't store data on a device, they make an ideal option for accessing secure data (as well as Windows applications) from mobile devices. In fact, Citrix has been a major factor in the iPad's rapid adoption in healthcare." (End of excerpt.) On top of that, Salesforce.com says the iPad app for its enterprise-strength Chatter social collaboration program has been downloaded more than 1 million times. When CIOs evaluate those types of head starts versus alternative tablets that (a) aren't even out yet and (b) have limited software partnerships immediately in place, Apple and the iPad look better and better. Unbeatable? Not necessarily—but again, for CIOs, the battle's about applications and business value, not about hardware features. On the business value side, the number of available apps tell much of the story because without them, well, it's pretty tough to do much business. But another huge factor in the business-value equation for tablets is price, and Mossberg offered some telling comments about that in his article about the Motorola Xoom versus the iPad: "Unfortunately for consumers looking for iPad alternatives, the Xoom has an Achilles' heel: price. While iPads come in a range of models priced all the way up to $829—none of which requires a cellphone contract—Apple's entry price for the iPad is just $499. By contrast, the base price of a Xoom without a cellphone contract is $800—60% more. And even with a Verizon two-year contract at $20 to $80 a month—depending on the data limit you choose—the least you can pay for a Xoom is $600, or 20% more before counting the contract costs." RECOMMENDED READING: <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229219030">Global CIO: iPad Becoming Kingmaker For Enterprise Apps</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229100252">Global CIO: Apple iOS Crushes Google Android In Enterprise</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229200135">Global CIO: HP Calls Out Apple In Quest To Be Coolest Of All</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229200297">Global CIO: Sam Palmisano And Larry Ellison Deserve Their Big Paydays</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226200113">Global CIO: Global CIO: Top 10 Reasons Steve Jobs & Apple Are The Future Of IT</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227400318">Global CIO: Global CIO: The Awesome Transformative Power Of The Apple iPad</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900335">Global CIO: Global CIO: Apple Storms The Enterprise As iPad And iPhone Surge</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/trends/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000909">Global CIO: Apple Hammers Google Over Tablet Flaws</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000430">Global CIO: The PC Is Dying; Long Live The iPad!</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000087">Global CIO: The Year Of iPad: Apple Booms In Business And In China</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900483">Global CIO: Global CIO: Inside Steve Jobs' Head: The Supremacy Of Software</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900123">Global CIO: Global CIO: The Top 10 Most Influential IT Vendors (Apple And Facebook?)</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900330">Global CIO: Global CIO: Steve Jobs Declares War On Google</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222600158">Global CIO: Global CIO: Apple's Steve Jobs Torpedoes Another Stale Business Model</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228200358">Global CIO: Steve Jobs Creating New-Age Broadcasting Network?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222700839">Global CIO: Global CIO: Why Apple's iPad Will Be A Great Business Device</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500100">Global CIO: Global CIO: Is IBM Or Apple The World's #1 Tech Brand?</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>2011-02-24T08:00:00ZGlobal CIO: HP CEO Apotheker Is Betting The FarmLeo Apotheker's silence has raised lots of uncertainty about HP, but he says a March 14 event will make everything clear. He'd better be right.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229219167?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsHP's new CEO, Leo Apotheker, has said he will make the company's products cooler than Apple's. HP's new CEO has said the company's future is centered on the cloud and connectivity. HP's new CEO has said the problems with slumping PC sales and IT services have been addressed and will not recur. HP's new CEO has said the company is primed for growth. And HP's CEO has said that on March 14th, he will roll out his grand vision for HP. In aggregate, what Apotheker's said hasn't been bad—it's mostly been fluffy and airy and utterly lacking in specifics while he toured the globe to speak with customers and employees. But not bad. Rather, it's what Apotheker hasn't said that is cause for concern about the world's biggest IT company, whose first-quarter revenue miss triggered an aggressive sell-off of HP stock, which fell more than 10% as investors showed they don't know exactly what to make of the company. Which brings us to this big March 14th "strategy summit," at which Apotheker will apparently lay it all out. I have no doubt that HP will put on a very professional and engaging event. But that aside, Apotheker's presentation had better be not just good, but astonishingly good—riveting, visionary, convincing, detailed, and brimming with conviction. In short, all of the qualities that have been lacking from HP over the 7+ months that will have passed since it ousted former CEO Mark Hurd in August of last year. (For extensive analyses of HP and its strategy, please check out our "Recommended Reading" list at the end of this column.) In the self-created vacuum, others have stepped up to point out what they feel are HP's shortcomings: IBM CEO Sam Palmisano said the HP made a big mistake by not investing enough in R&D over the past several years, and the resulting lack of innovative products is the result. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said HP's high-end systems are slow and brittle and simply unable to meet customers' needs, and that Oracle is going to very specifically "go after" HP in the marketplace. Dell's turning up the heat in the corporate PC marketplace, and Lenovo's going to try to exploit the consumer-PC softness that was a big problem for HP last quarter. Even HP's recent acquisition of Vertica, which gives the company a foothold in the analytics and Big Data sectors, has raised more questions than it answers since Vertica is only a portion of what HP needs to become a legitimate broad-based player in that very hot market. And in Tuesday's earnings call, Apotheker seemed unwilling or unable to reply to skeptical questions from analysts. That is absolutely, positively Apotheker's right—he's free to answer (or not answer) analysts' questions any way he wants. But in return, those analysts are left with the same concerns they had before, the same vagueness about who HP is and what it intends to become. Here area few telling examples:1) Tony Sacconaghi of Sanford Bernstein, who always asks some of the most-probing questions on these calls, said the HP presentation "sounded like China was down pretty materially" and "you're the only company that I know of whose Asia growth rate was slower than its overall company growth rate," according to the <a href="http://seekingalpha.com/article/254317-hewlett-packard-ceo-discusses-f1q2011-results-earnings-call-transcript">earnings-call transcript</a> on seekingalpha.com. He than asked about the dynamics behind that, and here's a very representative excerpt from Apotheker's answer: "We are not yet where we want to be, but we are cautiously optimistic about the actions we have been taking in China. It’s a big market. It’s a very important market. And we are very much focused in getting it right." 2) Keith Bachmann of Bank of Montreal noted that HP's quarterly revenue fell $2 billion short of the projection made the company itself made just 70 days earlier. Bachmann noted he was "surprised to hear some of the outlook difference comes from the services side." Apotheker's responded in part: " Let's be very clear about this. What happened in the revenues in Q1 is exactly what we have just described." Apotheker then went on to give details from other areas of HP about which Bachmann had not asked. Apotheker also said, "In Q1, we had a number of significant issues that we had to address. We have addressed them. Our portfolio is much stronger going forward." That answer clearly satisfied Apotheker, but I'll bet it raised even more questions in the mind of the analyst, just as the non-answer to the previous question about China had done. 3) Maynard Um of UBS then asked about any competitive impact caused by Cisco and Oracle, specifically asking about any variations in pricing or pipelines or related effects. Apotheker pretty much ignored the question and recapped HP's performance in services, servers, storage, and networking. Lots of CEOs do just what Apotheker and decline to specifically discuss competitors. But it seems Apotheker missed a perfect opportunity to give at least a hint about how HP's robust networking business beat Cisco on some big deals, or how Oracle talks too much, or how HP's Converged Infrastructure strategy will let it continue to beat those rivals. Instead, he let the uncertainty take root. Once again, it wasn't so much what he said, but what he didn't say. And that lack of clarity and specificity was not lost on the analyst community. Jason Maynard of Wells Fargo made this observation in a research note about HP's numbers: "HP results and guidance were disappointing and raise questions about their ability to achieve the full year forecast. If we dissect the Q1 performance and the guidance, HP has cut their Q2 outlook but left intact their 2H revenue and margin assumptions. With the weakness in both PSG and IT services, we think the implied improvement in the back half of the year is aggressive. We are a little surprised that HP didn’t take the opportunity to reset the bar since it will take some time for webOS to offset consumer PC weakness and for services to regain their footing." Apotheker is apparently banking that such short-term uncertainty will all be converted to long-term confidence as a result of the March 14 pow-wow, which he described thusly: "I’ll go over HP's strategy and how it will continue to evolve. I’ll talk about the opportunities we see in a more seamlessly connected world from the enterprise to the consumer, leveraging our strength in cloud and connectivity, and the portfolio of hardware, services, software, and solutions we need to make that happen." Hey—the guy's only been in office for a few months. And yes, HP's not a simple story to tell—it is, after all, the largest IT company in the world, with annual revenue of around $130 billion. But with this week's disappointing financial results and the consequent pounding of the stock price, and with Apotheker's vague responses to detailed inquiries from analysts, HP and its new CEO are now raising many more questions than they're answering. Not to worry, says Apotheker; all will be made clear on March 14. In making that play, Apotheker and HP have imbued that event with monumental significance—and expectations. If they nail it, they can generate significant momentum in the market and among investors, and Apotheker will deservedly see his credibility soar. But if they miss, Apotheker and HP will face withering scrutiny for many months to come. And they'll have no one but themselves to blame. RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229218815">Global CIO: As HP Stomps, Software Industry Shakes</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229218497">Global CIO: HP Mobile Dump Of Microsoft Is Brilliant</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000870">Global CIO: HP And Microsoft Launch Fleet Of Application Appliances</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229216829">Global CIO: Sam Palmisano Reveals Secret Behind IBM's Century Of Success</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000783">Global CIO: HP's New Strategy Will Intensify Battles With IBM And Oracle</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000361">Global CIO: The Top 10 CIO Issues For 2011</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227701035">Global CIO: Are HP And SAP Perfect Match Or Train Wreck?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229200135">Global CIO: HP Calls Out Apple In CEO's Quest To Be Coolest Of All</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000285">Global CIO: Silicon Valley Crackup: Oracle & HP Killing 25-Year Alliance?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228702008">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Vows To 'Go After' HP; Is Alliance Dead?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000430">Global CIO: The PC Is Dying: Long Live The iPad!</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500510">Global CIO: Larry Ellison And IBM Lead Surge In Optimized Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228800683">Global CIO: An Open Letter To IBM CEO Sam Palmisano</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900335">Global CIO: Apple Storms The Enterprise As iPad And iPhone Surge</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228300210">Global CIO: The Rise Of Analytics Triggers The Fall Of The Tactical CIO</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228201021">Global CIO: IBM Leads IT Industry With Surge In Analytics And Hardware</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228900228">Global CIO: Larry Ellison's 10-Point Plan For World Domination</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228300007">Global CIO: SAP's Striking Turnaround Triggered By Customer-Centric Strategy</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228200126">Global CIO: HP CEO Leo Apotheker's Agenda: What Will He Do First?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900123">Global CIO: The Top 10 Most-Influential IT Vendors</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>2011-02-22T11:35:00ZGlobal CIO: iPad Becoming Kingmaker For Enterprise AppsiPad's success in business market underscores critical need for competitors to match soaring downloads of iPad-ready enterprise apps.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229219030?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsThis iPad phenomenon—is it real? I mean, sure, consumers love it and Apple will sell them tens of millions, but is this little tablet really something CIOs should be evaluating? Is the iPad -- not to mention the dozens of new competitors that will be introduced in the next several months -- a serious business tool or just an annoying status symbol for high-level execs? A lot of readers are still asking those questions – and for those still in the skeptics camp, I think time is running out on them. Quickly. And that's going to become a very bad career dynamic in a very short time. And here's why: Applications. A flood of applications. By the end of this year, there will be thousands of enterprise-level apps for the iPad that are not just dumbed-down versions of traditional enterprise apps. Many of them will enable the iPad to do things that no other device can do as quickly, as attractively, as productively, and as simply. (For extensive analyses of the iPad's impact on the enterprise, please check out the "Recommended Reading" list at the end of this column.) CIOs who think the Apple iPad is little more than a stranger in a strange land and will never blend into their Windows-centric environments might want to note that <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/technology/21tablet.html">Citrix reports</a> that its iPad app that offers full access to Windows desktops has been downloaded more than 700,000 times. In more tangible terms, here's how that translates to innovation in the IT-rich world of healthcare, according to an <a href="http://www.itworld.com/security/136652/can-hps-webos-touchpad-gain-a-foothold-enterprise">ITworld.com article</a>: "Since Citrix virtual desktop solutions don't store data on a device, they make an ideal option for accessing secure data (as well as Windows applications) from mobile devices. In fact, Citrix has been a major factor in the iPad's rapid adoption in healthcare." The iPad was even highlighted by <a href="http://seekingalpha.com/article/248947-citrix-systems-ceo-discusses-q4-2010-results-earnings-call-transcript">Citrix CEO Mark Templeton</a> during a recent earnings call as he described how Citrix is ratcheting up its efforts to provide the software tools that will help weave the oncoming surge of mobile devices into diverse corporate IT environments: "In addition, our growth plan includes even richer collaboration experiences, partner app integrations, and expanded mobile device support including GoToMyPC for the iPad," Templeton said. Salesforce.com's popular new enterprise-level social collaboration tool, called Chatter, has also become an iPad phenomenon, says Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff:From a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/technology/21tablet.html">New York Times article</a>: "The software maker Salesforce.com said its Chatter iPad app, which lets users gain access to data from corporate software programs, had been downloaded more than a million times. Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, said Chatter was being used in more than 60,000 businesses. "Of course, I still have a PC," Mr. Benioff said. "But I am using it less and less and I am using my iPad more." He called 2011 "the year of the tablet" and added: "If you call me next year, I will say it is also the year of the tablet. And if you call me in 2013, I'll tell you it's going to be the year of the tablet." Those two examples should not be mistaken for aberrations, say two big IT industry research firms; rather, they exemplify the absolutely phenomenal growth that's expected in the mobile-app space. Check out these numbers from a recent <a href="http://seekingalpha.com/article/253865-huge-tech-growth-expected-from-apps?source=dashboard_stocks-sectors">post on seekingalpha.com</a>: "As I mentioned in a recent column, <a href="http://www.investmentu.com/2011/February/the-tech-trend-crushing-the-pc.html">the global app market topped $2 billion last year</a>. Astonishingly, Gartner, Inc. expects the market to generate $15.1 billion in revenue in 2011… $27 billion by 2013… and north of $35 billion by 2014, according to International Data Corporation." One more perspective, this one from an <a href="http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/113086/20110216/apple-inc-ipad-barclays-capital-forrester-research-tablet-research-in-motion-rim-blackberry-samsung.htm">International Business Times article</a> about how a noted IT analyst believes the iPad is pushing some CIOs to consider new IT purchasing models: "We continue to view Apple as the clear beneficiary in our sector of paradigm shift in computing toward mobile devices with the iPad and the iPhone. We believe consumers are increasingly buying more laptops, tablets and handheld devices and 'logging in' to apps and corporate networks," said Ben Reitzes, an analyst at Barclays Capital. Reitzes said this trend should mean that the key to corporate success over the long term is being strong in consumer devices that you use everyday. As a result, the purchase pattern is shifting toward laptops, tablets and smart phones being bought by consumers (all key areas of Apple’s strength), while direct sales of corporate products have shorter and smaller upgrade cycles. (End of excerpt.) At a time when all businesses are looking to make employees more productive and aware of corporate priorities, and when speed of analysis and execution is becoming increasingly vital, CIOs need to get out in front of this application wave that will sweep the Pad and probably some of its competitors into the heart of the enterprise.  RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229100252">Global CIO: Apple iOS Crushes Google Android In Enterprise</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229200135">Global CIO: HP Calls Out Apple In Quest To Be Coolest Of All</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229200297">Global CIO: Sam Palmisano And Larry Ellison Deserve Their Big Paydays</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226200113">Global CIO: Global CIO: Top 10 Reasons Steve Jobs & Apple Are The Future Of IT</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227400318">Global CIO: Global CIO: The Awesome Transformative Power Of The Apple iPad</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900335">Global CIO: Global CIO: Apple Storms The Enterprise As iPad And iPhone Surge</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/trends/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000909">Global CIO: Apple Hammers Google Over Tablet Flaws</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000430">Global CIO: The PC Is Dying; Long Live The iPad!</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000087">Global CIO: The Year Of iPad: Apple Booms In Business And In China</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900483">Global CIO: Global CIO: Inside Steve Jobs' Head: The Supremacy Of Software</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900123">Global CIO: Global CIO: The Top 10 Most Influential IT Vendors (Apple And Facebook?)</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900330">Global CIO: Global CIO: Steve Jobs Declares War On Google</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222600158">Global CIO: Global CIO: Apple's Steve Jobs Torpedoes Another Stale Business Model</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228200358">Global CIO: Steve Jobs Creating New-Age Broadcasting Network?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222700839">Global CIO: Global CIO: Why Apple's iPad Will Be A Great Business Device</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500100">Global CIO: Global CIO: Is IBM Or Apple The World's #1 Tech Brand?</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table> 2011-02-18T08:00:00ZGlobal CIO: Bill Clinton On Technology's Promise And ProblemsWarning that he doesn't know much about technology, the former president said tech's true potential lies in the service of institutions.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229218913?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsIn just the past week, we've seen and heard some grand visions about the interplay between ourselves as humans and the technology upon which we've become increasingly dependent and to which we've become also inextricably bound. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229211386">Oracle president Mark Hurd</a>, in a talk last week with a few hundred IT executives from the financial-services community, said that a year from now, Earth will be home to more mobile phones than people. It's an observation that at first seems almost obvious—who, after all, doesn't have one?—until we reflect on what that means about the growing pervasiveness of technology even in underdeveloped countries. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229218746">Google CEO Eric Schmidt</a> told the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that we are approaching a point in human-computer relations at which our gadgets will ensure that we are "not lost, never lonely, never bored." I know—well, I think—Schmidt meant that in a comforting and reassuring way, but I must confess his comment made my skin crawl. To say that because you will never be lonely because you have a computer that can help you communicate and consume is like saying that you will never be wrong because your computer can access and analyze information. Sorry, Eric, but if that's the cure, I'll take the disease. Then we had IBM's dazzling Watson computer thump its human opponents in a Jeopardy match. At some point, despite all of us knowing that humans created Watson and breathed into it every single bit of its intelligence, we had to wonder: does anybody really think that any mere flesh-and-blood mortal stands a chance against this astonishing machine? I think we have to really applaud the DNA-based life forms for doing as well as they did—no shame for them in that loss. For them, the problem was that the silicon-based thing was purpose-built to do what it did, whereas those zany humans are programmed to do all sorts of unfocused stuff like daydream and play basketball and change diapers and talk about whether those guys can beat the IBM computer at Jeopardy. Into this marvelous mix, then, comes the news that former President Bill Clinton made a surprise appearance at a tech-oriented conference called "Wired For Change" and was given a chance to share his thoughts. (You can read the full article at <a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/1728309/bill-clinton-wired-for-change-surprise-visit">FastCompany.com</a>.) Joshing that he's a know-nothing when it comes to technology, Clinton nevertheless held forth on the impact technology can have, and here are a few of his specific comments from that FastCompany.com article:On IT's role in the financial crisis: "What caused the meltdown? Our financial institutions worked arguably too well, at warp speed." As a result, the article describes Clinton as saying, "people used information technology to help do fancy things with money that were disconnected with the real economy." On IT's impact in poor countries and in rich countries: "The challenge in poor countries is institution building. The challenge in rich countries is institutional reform." On his legacy as a presidential email power user: "I sent a grand total of two emails as president," he said, "one to our troops in the Adriatic, and one to John Glenn when he was 77 years old in outer space. I figured it was OK if Congress subpoenaed those." Overall, I was struck by Clinton's focus on technology as a servant to institutions, whereas the overwhelming sentiment these days about technology's purpose is as a source of human or individual enrichment and engagement. Perhaps it's a matter of people's perceptions being shaped by what they know and what they've experienced -- in that case, it's understandable that Clinton would focus more on tech in the service of big organizations rather than individuals. As the saying goes, "May you live in interesting times." I don't think we need to consult Watson to assess whether that is currently the case for us. RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229218815">Global CIO: As HP Stomps, Software Industry Shakes</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229211386">Global CIO: Oracle's Mark Hurd Calls Out Deadly IT Strategies</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229218746">Global CIO: Google's Schmidt Whines About Nokia Snub</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229218497">Global CIO: HP Mobile Dump Of Microsoft Is Brilliant</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000870">Global CIO: HP And Microsoft Launch Fleet Of Application Appliances</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229216829">Global CIO: Sam Palmisano Reveals Secret Behind IBM's Century Of Success</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000783">Global CIO: HP's New Strategy Will Intensify Battles With IBM And Oracle</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000361">Global CIO: The Top 10 CIO Issues For 2011</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227701035">Global CIO: Are HP And SAP Perfect Match Or Train Wreck?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229200135">Global CIO: HP Calls Out Apple In CEO's Quest To Be Coolest Of All</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000285">Global CIO: Silicon Valley Crackup: Oracle & HP Killing 25-Year Alliance?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228702008">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Vows To 'Go After' HP; Is Alliance Dead?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000430">Global CIO: The PC Is Dying: Long Live The iPad!</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500510">Global CIO: Larry Ellison And IBM Lead Surge In Optimized Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228800683">Global CIO: An Open Letter To IBM CEO Sam Palmisano</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900335">Global CIO: Apple Storms The Enterprise As iPad And iPhone Surge</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228300210">Global CIO: The Rise Of Analytics Triggers The Fall Of The Tactical CIO</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228201021">Global CIO: IBM Leads IT Industry With Surge In Analytics And Hardware</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228900228">Global CIO: Larry Ellison's 10-Point Plan For World Domination</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228300007">Global CIO: SAP's Striking Turnaround Triggered By Customer-Centric Strategy</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228200126">Global CIO: HP CEO Leo Apotheker's Agenda: What Will He Do First?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900123">Global CIO: The Top 10 Most-Influential IT Vendors</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>2011-02-17T08:00:00ZGlobal CIO: As HP Stomps, Software Industry Shakes The $130 billion giant's moving aggressively into software and is proving it's not afraid to stomp on some toes—-even those of trusted partners.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229218815?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsTwo guys out hunting bear sit down for a rest, their guns on the ground beside them. A massive bear crashes through the bushes and the guys run for their lives. After sprinting all-out for a full minute, one guy pants, "I don't know how much longer I can outrun that bear." And the other guy says, "I don't give a hoot about the bear -- I just have to outrun you!" I get the sense that a lot of software companies in the applications and analytics markets are feeling that way these days as Hewlett-Packard is displaying a ravenous appetite for software, whether through acquisitions (Vertica), partnerships (Microsoft for appliances), or leveraging existing products (choosing to go with its own WebOS instead of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7). All of those moves -- and there are surely many more to come -- show that HP is actively defending and expanding its own interests even if that self-interest clashes with established relationships in the here and now HP's also showing clear indications that it is putting its own well-being, its own needs, and its own hunger far ahead of any considerations for the feelings and sensitivities of existing partners. For HP itself, that's a very good thing: over the past couple of years, as other leading IT companies fattened up on software acquisitions in the burgeoning sectors of analytics, BI, data warehousing, and vertical-industry apps, HP focused almost exclusively on its management and infrastructure software portfolio. Again, not a darned thing wrong with being a big and aggressive player in those area -- but for a company aspiring to top-tier status, management tools and infrastructure technology, no matter how good, are simply not enough in our data-driven world. But what about HP's new and decidedly more-aggressive intentions toward the software market? Are its recent steps just a random flurry of activity or a sign of bigger and bolder things to come, including more acquisitions, more restructured partnerships, and in general a relentless effort to be considered a powerhouse in 21st-century enterprise applications? CIOs trying to plan on what the software landscape might look like in mid-2011 have to consider the extraordinary upheaval that's taken place in just the past six months in the relationships involving HP and its two biggest and longest-tenured enterprise partners, Oracle and SAP. Only five months ago, execs from both Oracle and HP renewed their pledges of commitment to each other, only to see those vows blown up just days later when HP hired long-time Oracle nemesis Leo Apotheker as its CEO. Since then, Oracle has become a bitter rival of HP, and Oracle chief Larry Ellison has given every indication that HP as a partner is dead to him. Great news for SAP, right? Well, it certainly started out that way, and it might still end up that way, but recently HP, particularly with the acquisition of Vertica, has shown that it wants a big piece of some of SAP's most-strategic businesses, including analytics, BI, and data warehousing. And that's sure to make things less cozy for HP's relationships with both SAP and Microsoft, says top technology analyst Jason Maynard of Wells Fargo:"The confusing part of this acquisition is the fact that it may complicate HP's partnerships with SAP and Microsoft," wrote Maynard in a research note on the Vertica deal. "We were under the impression that HP wasn’t going to take Oracle and IBM head-on since they discontinued the Neoview data warehousing product and recently announced a new appliance with Microsoft." Contrast that current assessment with the understandably optimistic forecast offered by SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott in early October after Apotheker was hired: "This is great news for HP and for SAP," said McDermott, as reported in my column called <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227600117">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Puts HP In Crosshairs Via Slap At New CEO</a>. "SAP and HP are outstanding partners, HP is a great SAP customer, and this move only sets the stage for an even deeper relationship between our two companies. Leo understands our business model and how to fully advantage this partnership to help our joint customers be best-run businesses," said McDermott. But Vertica's only the beginning for HP as it begins to buy its way into the software industry's hottest sectors, which are being propelled by voracious demand from companies that have come to understand that business analytics have shifted from being exotic applications for specialists to being indispensable decision-making tools for entire organizations. (For a great overview of Vertica and the HP deal, be sure to check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/info_management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229218795">this analysis</a> by my colleague Doug Henschen.) It's a great young company but offers HP only a toehold in its ascent into the upper echelons of the software industry. Here's how Wells Fargo's Maynard summarized it in his research note: "On its own, Vertica is not enough to change the game and make HP a player," Maynard wrote. "Normally, a small acquisition such as this would not be a big deal, except for the fact that it potentially could signal bigger software plans under new CEO Leo Apotheker. If there aren’t additional steps then it doesn’t seem worth the trouble and customer confusion given the potential overlap with their jointly developed partner offerings." That's the key point: without additional acquisitions, "it doesn't seem worth the trouble and customer confusion" (boldface emphasis added). Uncertainty among partners can be nettlesome, but when that spills over into confusion among customers, uncertainty becomes real trouble. HP has to address this potential customer confusion, and it has to do so soon. As described above, the Vertica deal should give SAP every reason to wonder about HP's longer-term intentions. Also, within the last couple of weeks, HP snubbed another strategic software partner, Microsoft, by making HP's own WebOS the heart of its mobile strategy, instead of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7. (You can read all about that in <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229218497">Global CIO: HP Mobile Dump Of Microsoft Is Brilliant</a>.) Four months ago, I wrote a column called <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227701035">Global CIO: Are HP And SAP Perfect Match Or Train Wreck?</a>, and here are the central questions I explored in that column: "Did the HP board really bring on Leo Apotheker and his nontrivial baggage just to manage and perhaps expand HP's relationship with SAP? Is that all there is? Even if HP had hired Barney Fife as CEO instead of Apotheker, SAP would almost certainly have wanted to extend its relationship with HP, particularly in the face of Oracle's increasing presence in hardware and IBM's increasing presence in software." And today, as HP has acquired Vertica and begun stepping into SAP's core business; as HP has brushed off Microsoft's mobile OS in favor of its own; as HP has sent mixed signals to Microsoft about the role it will play as HP's core appliance partner; and as HP clearly intends to buy its way more deeply into the software industry, those questions are even more relevant. HP has signalled clearly to its partners that HP's #1 priority is its own self interest -- and bully for HP for taking that awkward but essential step. But at the same time, HP should not be surprised if its core software partners -- particularly Microsoft and SAP -- begin doing exactly the same thing. RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229218497">Global CIO: HP Mobile Dump Of Microsoft Is Brilliant</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000870">Global CIO: HP And Microsoft Launch Fleet Of Application Appliances</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229216829">Global CIO: Sam Palmisano Reveals Secret Behind IBM's Century Of Success</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000783">Global CIO: HP's New Strategy Will Intensify Battles With IBM And Oracle</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000361">Global CIO: The Top 10 CIO Issues For 2011</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227701035">Global CIO: Are HP And SAP Perfect Match Or Train Wreck?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229200135">Global CIO: HP Calls Out Apple In CEO's Quest To Be Coolest Of All</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000285">Global CIO: Silicon Valley Crackup: Oracle & HP Killing 25-Year Alliance?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228702008">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Vows To 'Go After' HP; Is Alliance Dead?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000430">Global CIO: The PC Is Dying: Long Live The iPad!</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500510">Global CIO: Larry Ellison And IBM Lead Surge In Optimized Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228800683">Global CIO: An Open Letter To IBM CEO Sam Palmisano</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900335">Global CIO: Apple Storms The Enterprise As iPad And iPhone Surge</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228300210">Global CIO: The Rise Of Analytics Triggers The Fall Of The Tactical CIO</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228201021">Global CIO: IBM Leads IT Industry With Surge In Analytics And Hardware</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228900228">Global CIO: Larry Ellison's 10-Point Plan For World Domination</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228300007">Global CIO: SAP's Striking Turnaround Triggered By Customer-Centric Strategy</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228200126">Global CIO: HP CEO Leo Apotheker's Agenda: What Will He Do First?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900123">Global CIO: The Top 10 Most-Influential IT Vendors</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>2011-02-16T10:40:00ZGlobal CIO: Google CEO Schmidt Whines About Nokia SnubSchmidt didn't help his company by criticizing Nokia's choice of Microsoft or by describing a creepy future in which we're never lonely. http://www.informationweek.com/news/229218746?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsDuring an emotional scene in A League Of Their Own, the 1992 movie about a women's professional baseball league, crusty and hard-drinking team manager Tom Hanks screams, "There's no crying in baseball!!" That's some advice outgoing Google CEO Eric Schmidt should have heeded yesterday before dispensing some whiny comments about Nokia's decision to choose Microsoft Windows Phone 7 over Google's Android. Instead, Schmidt—who will soon be stepping down as CEO to make way for Google co-founder Larry Page to assume the top spot—seemed intent on criticizing Nokia's choice of Microsoft and repeating that the door's always open should Nokia at some point in the future decide to renounce its mistake and come home to Google. At the big Mobile World Congress event taking place in Barcelona, Schmidt disclosed that Google had held extensive discussions with Nokia before the former mobile-phone leader picked Microsoft as the partner that would be best able to revive its fortunes. "We would have loved that they had chosen Android," <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8327677/Google-Nokia-made-wrong-choice-with-Microsoft.html">Schmidt is quoted as saying</a> in the U.K's Telegraph. "They chose the other guys, that other competitor, Microsoft. I think we are pretty straightforward. . . . We would like them to adopt Android at some point in the future and that offer remains open. We think Android was a good choice for Nokia. We are sorry they made a different choice." Sorry? Sorry?!? There's no sorry in business! Before suggesting what Schmidt should have said, I feel compelled to mention that Schmidt, as the CEO of a company that has had some pretty serious run-ins with privacy standards, policies, and laws, offered an absolutely creepy vision of the Google-driven future in which our gadgets will ensure the following:That we will be "not lost, never lonely, never bored," Schmidt is quoted as saying by the Telegraph. Eric, you've done some wonderful things for Google and its customers, but promising us that Google's future role will be to ensure that we are "never lonely" and "never bored" is rock-solid proof that it's time for you to turn over the CEO reins to someone else. There's an almost unfathomable gulf between using devices that can help us connect with friends, play games, and communicate, and living in some dreamy hallucination where we're "never lonely" and "never bored." If that's the future for digital technology, then give me a trusty stone tablet and a chisel. But back to Schmidt's pouting over Nokia. Consider these observations from Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins in his superb piece this morning called <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704409004576146101012422920.html">The Phone Wars Aren't Over</a>: [Nokia] is trying to rescue itself with its smart phone tie-up with Microsoft, and anyone who thinks the game is over should refer to paragraph one. The game isn't over. Chances are good that Apple and Google, today's dominant players, will also miss a beat at some point, in Apple's case perhaps through control freakery, in Google's because of creepiness with personal data. . . . Nokia once thought it wasn't important to be a player in the U.S. market, with its cacophony of conflicting standards. It's paying for that mistake now. Four years after the iPhone was introduced, Nokia still hasn't delivered a version of its Symbian operating system that holds a candle to its competitors. As one critic recently put it, "Symbian needs more keystrokes to do less than the iPhone and Androids even after a yearlong revamp." The lesson for the new Nokia and everyone else is an old one: Nobody knows anything, and there's no substitute for messy, wasteful competition as a finder of solutions to problems we didn't even know we needed solutions for. Whether the mobile world will settle into one nonproprietary or many proprietary ecosystems is far from decided. That's the sort of message Eric Schmidt should have been delivering in Barcelona—the vision for the industry, the flow of time and value and opportunities, the supremacy of competition and customer choice—not some drivel about being sorry that Nokia's led by a bunch of doofusses who don't properly recognize Google's infallibility and omniscience. In closing, consider this anecdote from Jenkins's column about the chronic shortsightedness that has dogged the mobile-phone business since the 1990s and about how competition—bare-knuckled, innovative, and centered on the customer—will trump the perceived wisdom of industry insiders every time: Bill Joy, the Sun Microsystems guru, spoke for many when he complained at the time that America suffered from "too much competition," thanks to too many wireless companies promoting too many rival standards. We were ceding wireless leadership to the Europeans and Japanese, he warned. He was right, in a way. Competition is messy and wasteful, but it also chivvies companies to discover or invent opportunity. And from nowhere, when the mobile broadband opportunity was finally ripe, came two American companies, Apple and Google, to seize most of the value. Though some resist the knowledge, our "too much competition" is exactly what created the opening for Apple to go to market with a $600-plus, feature-rich, exquisitely engineered smartphone (which AT&T would subsidize for its customers). Please, Eric: more innovation, less whining. RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229218611">Global CIO: Cisco Zapped By Destructive Power Of Innovation</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229218539">Global CIO: Is Apple Or IBM The #1 Most-Respected Large Corporation?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229218497">Global CIO: HP Mobile Dump Of Microsoft Is Brilliant</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229216829">Global CIO: Sam Palmisano Reveals Secret Behind IBM's Century Of Success</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229201238">Global CIO: IBM's Most Disruptive Acquisition Of 2010 Is Netezza</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228800683">Global CIO: An Open Letter To IBM CEO Sam Palmisano</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229205736">Global CIO: IBM On Oracle Exadata: It's A Hog To Install</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229001011">Global CIO: IBM Zings Oracle And HP Over Limited Vision</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229100408">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Will Need A Time Machine To Catch Us, Says IBM</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228000007">Global CIO: As IBM Accelerates Analytics Business, Can Anyone Keep Up?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223100019">Global CIO: Oracle Needs More Than Ellison's Talk To Beat IBM's Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223101319">Global CIO: IBM Claims Hardware Supremacy And Calls Out HP's Hurd</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226100133">Global CIO: IBM Doubles Down On Red-Hot Optimized Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226700424">Global CIO: IBM's Brilliant Trojan Horse Strategy Transcends Technology</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227001077">Global CIO: IBM Top Product Exec Discusses Strategy, Systems, & Oracle</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227200199">Global CIO: IBM's Blazing New Mainframe Wins Raves From Citigroup</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500100">Global CIO: Is IBM Or Apple The World's #1 Tech Brand?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500510">Global CIO: Larry Ellison And IBM Lead Surge In Optimized Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500833">Global CIO: IBM Turns Guns On Cisco With Acquisition Of Blade Network</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227501021">Global CIO: Tibco Surges And CIO Flips Off IBM, Oracle, And SAP</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900123">Global CIO: The Top 10 Most Influential IT Vendors (Apple And Facebook?)</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221600338">Global CIO: IBM CEO Sam Palmisano Talks With Global CIO</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223800065">Global CIO: Why IBM CEO Sam Palmisano Earned His $24.3 Million</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>2011-02-15T07:17:00ZGlobal CIO: Cisco Zapped By Destructive Power Of InnovationWhile John Chambers's company has branched far beyond its networking roots, that core business has stumbled—and competitors are pouncing. http://www.informationweek.com/news/229218611?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsA funny thing's happened to Cisco on its way to creating the consumer-driven "human network": its core enterprise business has begun to buckle under the weight of massive costs, relentless competition from rivals large and small, and prices that have dropped faster than volume sales can rise. Broad and sweeping ambition can be a wonderful thing in the business world but it usually leads to trouble or even disaster unless that ambition is matched with equal measures of superb market focus, operational execution, and cost management. Over the last 12 months, Cisco hasn't scored so well in those vital areas even as it has attempted to transcend its traditional networking business and become a leading or event dominant player in everything from high-end video conferencing to consumer electronics to consumer branding to servers storage that could lead to end-to-end Cisco stacks. Again, I find nothing wrong with that aggressive approach—but, if you're going to play that way at that scale, the margin of error is perilously slight. Cisco's discovered that in each of its last three quarters as investors have hammered John Chambers' company for failing to match the strong double-digit revenue growth expectations he predicted and for also failing to manage costs as effectively as Cisco has traditionally done. As the San Jose Mercury News <a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/rss/ci_17341845?source=rss&nclick_check=1">reported last week</a>: "But despite better than expected revenue and earnings numbers, lingering questions about the company's gross margins—and what they portend for Cisco's future profitability—helped drive the stock down nearly 9 percent in after-hours trading. . . . Chambers in November stunned Wall Street by predicting 3 percent to 5 percent growth for the first quarter and 9 percent to 12 percent for fiscal year 2011; both were significantly less than the 13 percent analysts had expected for both periods, sparking fears the company could be losing market share to competitors. It was his second cautionary forecast in as many quarters and sent Cisco shares plunging by 16 percent, though the stock had regained some ground in recent weeks. (End of excerpt.) Meanwhile, networking sales among Cisco rivals such as Hewlett-Packard and Juniper Networks have been booming—so what's the core problem confronting Cisco? Investment analyst Jon D. Markman, writing on moneymorning.com, has completed a thorough examination of the patient and says that Cisco is suffering from a very serious case of "the destructive force of innovation":The really big problem for Cisco—as is true of so many large, sclerotic companies that count on the government for a lot of their business—is that the prices that the firm can charge for its core business are dropping faster than sales, writes Markman in a piece called <a href="http://moneymorning.com/2011/02/14/cisco-systems-inc.-nasdaq-csco-the-story-that-wall-street-missed/">Cisco Systems Inc.: The Story That Wall Street Missed</a>. Think about that for a moment. Revenue for switches—a huge part of Cisco's business—fell. That was bad enough. But margins thinned—which is even worse. (End of excerpt.) How can this be? At a time when companies are frantically expanding their use of online communications and networks for everything from collaborative design to meetings to research to blueprints and video and so much more, the demand for high-capacity and ultra-reliable networking gear has never been stronger. Why has Cisco not been able to exploit this market demand more aggressively—and, beyond that, why have its growth projections receded to the point where Chambers is reluctant to say if his company can return to its recent 12%+ growth rates? Ironically, it appears that Cisco, which for the past 15 years has sold products, services, and know-how that helped its customers in every industry accelerate their pace of business and be able to move at the speeds their marketplaces demand, failed to take its own medicine. Here's how Markman describes the profit-pounding dynamic Cisco is undergoing: Yet the elephant in the room is the fact that competitive pressures are forcing Cisco to move customers to new products more quickly than it intended, according to research analysts for Signal Hill Capital LLC. Channel checks suggest that sales of the company's largest switching platform, the Catalyst 6500, slowed at the end of 2010 as the product rapidly become uncompetitive from a price and functionality perspective. Responding to this trouble like a SWAT team, Cisco did finally migrate customers to its hot new product lines, the Nexus switch family and the ASR routers family. Both of these are more competitive—but at much lower margin. Ouch! (End of excerpt.) So because it was not—and perhaps still is not—keeping pace with the requirements and demands of its customers, Cisco's high-margin legacy products are being cannibalized by its new gear, which offers the performance levels customers need but can't yet deliver the profit margins investors demand. And this deep-seated problem of Cisco's, says Markman, is not going away anytime soon. "This is not a problem that can be fixed in three months," he writes, because as Web traffic booms and enterprises buy and deploy more-powerful networks to keep up, those recession-hardened customers aren't willing to pay the premiums Cisco used to be able to command—and competitors like HP and Juniper are more than willing to ensure that pricing pressure only intensifies. So although Cisco's been able to migrate its big customers to its new high-end products, the whipsaw effect has been that "because [Cisco] has so many employees and so much overhead this increased business is not dropping to the bottom line," writes Markman. And as a result, "We are watching the destructive force of innovation at work." It is ironic indeed that Cisco, which over the past couple of decades has helped thousands of customers unleash that very same "destructive force of innovation" on their competitors, is now feeling some of the blunt-force trauma of innovation's unyielding edge. RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500833">Global CIO: IBM Turns Guns On Cisco With Acquisition Of Blade Network</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900661">Global CIO: Oracle And Cisco Join Forces On a $1-Trillion Idea</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229218539">Global CIO: Is Apple Or IBM The #1 Most-Respected Large Corporation?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229218497">Global CIO: HP Mobile Dump Of Microsoft Is Brilliant</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229216829">Global CIO: Sam Palmisano Reveals Secret Behind IBM's Century Of Success</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229201238">Global CIO: IBM's Most Disruptive Acquisition Of 2010 Is Netezza</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228800683">Global CIO: An Open Letter To IBM CEO Sam Palmisano</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229205736">Global CIO: IBM On Oracle Exadata: It's A Hog To Install</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229001011">Global CIO: IBM Zings Oracle And HP Over Limited Vision</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229100408">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Will Need A Time Machine To Catch Us, Says IBM</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228000007">Global CIO: As IBM Accelerates Analytics Business, Can Anyone Keep Up?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223100019">Global CIO: Oracle Needs More Than Ellison's Talk To Beat IBM's Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223101319">Global CIO: IBM Claims Hardware Supremacy And Calls Out HP's Hurd</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226100133">Global CIO: IBM Doubles Down On Red-Hot Optimized Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226700424">Global CIO: IBM's Brilliant Trojan Horse Strategy Transcends Technology</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227001077">Global CIO: IBM Top Product Exec Discusses Strategy, Systems, & Oracle</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227200199">Global CIO: IBM's Blazing New Mainframe Wins Raves From Citigroup</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500100">Global CIO: Is IBM Or Apple The World's #1 Tech Brand?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500510">Global CIO: Larry Ellison And IBM Lead Surge In Optimized Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500833">Global CIO: IBM Turns Guns On Cisco With Acquisition Of Blade Network</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227501021">Global CIO: Tibco Surges And CIO Flips Off IBM, Oracle, And SAP</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900123">Global CIO: The Top 10 Most Influential IT Vendors (Apple And Facebook?)</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221600338">Global CIO: IBM CEO Sam Palmisano Talks With Global CIO</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223800065">Global CIO: Why IBM CEO Sam Palmisano Earned His $24.3 Million</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>2011-02-14T10:50:00ZGlobal CIO: Is Apple Or IBM The #1 Most-Respected Large Corporation?IBM and Apple held their high ground but HP and Cisco lost respect among money managers ranking the world's 100 largest corporations for Barron's.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229218539?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsWhen it comes to winning the respect of money managers, Apple held its #1 spot atop a list of the world's 100 largest corporations for the second straight year, according to a survey in Barron's. Coming in at #4, IBM also held its ground from last year, as did Microsoft at #22. Respect is a slightly fluffy thing to quantify, but here's how the <a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/money_co/2011/02/apple-most-respected-company-barrons-amazon-berkshire-ibm.html">Los Angeles Times</a> described the approach taken by Barron's in its seventh annual r-e-s-p-e-c-t survey: Barron's asked 92 money managers nationwide to rank the world's 100 largest companies (by stock market capitalization) according to the level of respect the managers have for the firms. How is respect judged? The factor mentioned most often by the respondents was whether a company had a "sound business strategy." That was followed by "strong management," "ethical business practices" and "competitive edge." Profitability doesn't seem terribly important in this ranking—or so the managers said, anyway. Mentioned fifth-most-often as a respect factor was "revenue and profit growth." Apple has had plenty of both. Riding its soaring financial results, the company's stock zoomed 53% last year and is up nearly 11% this year, to $356.85 as of Friday. Its stock market capitalization of $328 billion is second only to Exxon Mobil's $412 billion. (End of excerpt.) Elsewhere on the list, the results for these four enterprise-IT heavyweights—Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and SAP—were decidedly mixed as two rose nicely while the other two fell, one quite dramatically:While Oracle climbed from #39 to #27 and SAP moved up from #43 to #38, Cisco dropped from #9 to #15, while Hewlett-Packard tumbled from #25 to #59. One of the most dramatic gains in money-manager respect was generated by Amazon, which placed #2 behind Apple after coming in last year at #10. Other tech companies making the list: Google rose from #8 to #6; Intel slipped from #14 to #17; Qualcomm slipped from #28 to #33; Verizon rose from #51 to #45; AT&T rose to #74 from #81; NTT DoCoMo inched up from #77 to #75; and fast-growing China Mobile fell from #75 to #85. Among other well-known global corporations, Toyota's troubles took it from #6 to #47; Goldman Sachs tumbled from #30 to #66; BP's disaster in the Gulf dropped it from #47 to #95; and McDonald's moved up in the Top 10 from #7 to #5. The full list is <a href="http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/BA-TOP100-LARGEST-0214.pdf">here</a>. RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229216829">Global CIO: Sam Palmisano Reveals Secret Behind IBM's Century Of Success</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229201238">Global CIO: IBM's Most Disruptive Acquisition Of 2010 Is Netezza</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228800683">Global CIO: An Open Letter To IBM CEO Sam Palmisano</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229205736">Global CIO: IBM On Oracle Exadata: It's A Hog To Install</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229001011">Global CIO: IBM Zings Oracle And HP Over Limited Vision</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229100408">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Will Need A Time Machine To Catch Us, Says IBM</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228000007">Global CIO: As IBM Accelerates Analytics Business, Can Anyone Keep Up?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223100019">Global CIO: Oracle Needs More Than Ellison's Talk To Beat IBM's Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223101319">Global CIO: IBM Claims Hardware Supremacy And Calls Out HP's Hurd</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226100133">Global CIO: IBM Doubles Down On Red-Hot Optimized Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226700424">Global CIO: IBM's Brilliant Trojan Horse Strategy Transcends Technology</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227001077">Global CIO: IBM Top Product Exec Discusses Strategy, Systems, & Oracle</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227200199">Global CIO: IBM's Blazing New Mainframe Wins Raves From Citigroup</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500100">Global CIO: Is IBM Or Apple The World's #1 Tech Brand?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500510">Global CIO: Larry Ellison And IBM Lead Surge In Optimized Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500833">Global CIO: IBM Turns Guns On Cisco With Acquisition Of Blade Network</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227501021">Global CIO: Tibco Surges And CIO Flips Off IBM, Oracle, And SAP</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900123">Global CIO: The Top 10 Most Influential IT Vendors (Apple And Facebook?)</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221600338">Global CIO: IBM CEO Sam Palmisano Talks With Global CIO</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223800065">Global CIO: Why IBM CEO Sam Palmisano Earned His $24.3 Million</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>2011-02-14T08:00:00ZGlobal CIO: HP Mobile Dump Of Microsoft Is BrilliantHP and Microsoft must forge a partnership whose future transcends the PC business—will their egos let them?http://www.informationweek.com/news/229218497?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsThere's an intriguing multidimensional chess game going on that's pitted Hewlett-Packard against its leading software partners as HP, under new CEO Leo Apotheker, is beginning to test just how deeply it can push into various software markets without nuking those strategic partnerships. A perfect example is HP's leap last week into head-to-head competition with Microsoft Windows by putting HP's WebOS inside not only its new smartphones and tablets but also future PCs and other products. Is this an apocalyptic slap across the face and a demand to settle things once and for all with pistols at 20 paces? Is it an inevitable move by HP that has less to do with Microsoft than it does with Apotheker's vision of what HP needs to become in order to grow in relevance and significance among both consumers and business customers? Is it a recognition by HP that in a rapidly changing world where mobility is driving innovation and customer value, HP needs to be more of a central player and less of a commodity bystander? Is it a pragmatic and forward-looking gambit by HP to realign its deep-seated partnership with Microsoft away from consumer devices and more toward high-end, high-margin information appliances, such as the $2,000,000 HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance the companies jointly introduced last month? I think the HP move—for all of its bluntness, and for all of the short-term tension it will likely cause with Microsoft—is in fact a combination of all of the factors cited above and one that underscores how profoundly different the IT industry and its partnerships are today than was the case just a few years ago. After all, it was only five months ago that Oracle and HP executives loudly and proudly proclaimed their renewed commitment to one another, reaffirming that the issues surrounding Mark Hurd's move to Oracle would not outweigh the value and mutual benefit the companies placed on their 30-year-long strategic alliance. But then HP named Apotheker as CEO, and that hiring of the former SAP CEO proved to be an incursion too far for Oracle CEO Larry Ellison—and today, the HP-Oracle alliance lies in tatters and is all but dead. Think of that: a 30-year alliance spanning more than 100,000 jointly supported customers and billions of dollars in revenue reduced to a shell in a matter of months because both companies felt that as significant as their shared past has been, that history could not supercede the need for each company to focus solely on its own self-interest as they moved into the future. For HP and Microsoft, yes, it's a short-term shocker: Microsoft sees its hegemony over the PC industry further challenged in the wake of the Apple iPad's stunning success among corporations, and HP now steps forth on its own into a world where the only thing bigger than its potential is the risk it faces in having almost no developer ecosystem or support. As my colleague Fritz Nelson wrote last week in a column called, "HP Goes All-In With WebOS":"But bold moves don't come without risks. WebOS was astonishingly good when Palm first announced it two years ago, when it received this same sort of buzz. Two years later, with one of the world's biggest, most successful companies behind it, and the OS has <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal-tech/tablets/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229216461">yet to attract even a modicum</a> of developer support. Despite Palm's early pledge to make mobile application development as easy as creating a Web experience, I've heard nary a Palm developer back up that claim." So what's the story—has HP turned suicidal? For some perspective on that, let's look at a recent comment from the CEO of a company HP dislikes almost as much as it dislikes Oracle: IBM chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano. In a recent speech commemorating IBM's centennial, Palmisano said this about the PC business as I wrote about in <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229216829">Global CIO: Sam Palmisano Reveals Secret Behind IBM's Century Of Success</a>: "[The IBM PC] was by any measure the most recognizable brand for us—and arguably the only brand that touched individuals: tens of millions of people. For all these reasons, the idea that we would divest the PC business was, for many—pardon the pun—unthinkable." Yet that's exactly what IBM did because it foresaw the looming commoditization of the PC business and resolved across the company to put those core, long-term beliefs and culture spoken about by Watson 50 years ago ahead of the short-term "unthinkable" consequences. Here's Palmisano's rationale for that momentous decision: "We are innovators. In 1981 the PC was an innovation. Twenty years later it had lost much of its differentiation. It was time to move on—to the future." I think that's exactly what HP is doing here: choosing to let go of some very successful parts of its past in order to be able to create a more vibrant and successful future. That decision will let HP focus on two very different but very vital opportunities—and for that, Apotheker deserves a great deal of credit: 1) Building its mobile future around WebOS instead of Windows: Right now, all the buzz is about HP embedding WebOS inside its forthcoming tablet and its smartphones, PCs, and printers. Those are all swell ideas, but the real value for HP could come when that WebOS-powered wireless ecosystem is extended out to engage with HP's sensor business and the tens or hundreds of millions of machines, laboratory equipment, oil wells, appliances, and other devices and systems that will soon be connected via those HP sensors. On top of that physical ecosystem and the staggering volumes of data it creates, HP can then step forward with an analytics play to make sense out of all that data—and, not surprisingly, HP will once more need to redefine some software relationships to fully exploit that opportunity. 2) HP and Microsoft can now focus on high-end, high-value appliances: While HP's massive PC business can provide some nice scale for WebOS, Microsoft needs to look past that and redouble its efforts with HP in developing the new wave of highly engineered, integrated, and optimized systems that are becoming increasingly popular among enterprises. Here's a glimpse at that new type of HP-Microsoft potential from a recent column called <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000870">Global CIO: HP And Microsoft Launch Fleet Of Application Appliances</a>: "But no one so far has taken a comprehensive look at solving business problems by standing-up a set of solutions for productivity improvements and that reduce complexity. And we think that the industry's #1 infrastructure company [that would be HP] and #1 provider of productivity tools and business apps [that would be Microsoft] are the only ones who could do this: the industry's first complete portfolio of converged appliances," [HP vice president Paul] Miller said. . . . [Microsoft general manager Doug] Leland added that the new HP appliances—optimized to run with a wide range of Microsoft software—are intended to deliver to customers "an immediate reduction in cost, complexity, and risk. They're pretuned, preconfigured, and preselected to work together to decrease that cost and risk," Leland said. In my recent column called Global CIO: The Top 10 CIO Issues For 2011", I included optimized systems as a top priority for CIOs because the innovative technologies offer not only cost savings and faster time to value on the back end, but are also delivering unprecedented levels of performance and scalability due to the optimization efforts by both hardware and software engineers. There's still a lot of hay to be made via the joint efforts of Microsoft and HP and each company will need to view HP's recent decision in the contexts of not only this rapidly evolving industry but also and more importantly the even more rapidly evolving needs of businesses and tastes of consumers. RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000870">Global CIO: HP And Microsoft Launch Fleet Of Application Appliances</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229216829">Global CIO: Sam Palmisano Reveals Secret Behind IBM's Century Of Success</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000783">Global CIO: HP's New Strategy Will Intensify Battles With IBM And Oracle</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000361">Global CIO: The Top 10 CIO Issues For 2011</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227701035">Global CIO: Are HP And SAP Perfect Match Or Train Wreck?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229200135">Global CIO: HP Calls Out Apple In CEO's Quest To Be Coolest Of All</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000285">Global CIO: Silicon Valley Crackup: Oracle & HP Killing 25-Year Alliance?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228702008">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Vows To 'Go After' HP; Is Alliance Dead?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229001011">Global CIO: IBM Zings Oracle And HP Over Limited Vision</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227400105">Global CIO: Gunning For IBM And Oracle, HP Plans Optimized-Systems Blitz</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000430">Global CIO: The PC Is Dying: Long Live The iPad!</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500510">Global CIO: Larry Ellison And IBM Lead Surge In Optimized Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228800683">Global CIO: An Open Letter To IBM CEO Sam Palmisano</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900335">Global CIO: Apple Storms The Enterprise As iPad And iPhone Surge</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900330">Global CIO: Steve Jobs Declares War On Google</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228800222">Global CIO: Apple, IBM, Or Microsoft: Who Has #1 Most-Valuable Software Product?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228300210">Global CIO: The Rise Of Analytics Triggers The Fall Of The Tactical CIO</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228201021">Global CIO: IBM Leads IT Industry With Surge In Analytics And Hardware</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228900228">Global CIO: Larry Ellison's 10-Point Plan For World Domination</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228300007">Global CIO: SAP's Striking Turnaround Triggered By Customer-Centric Strategy</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228701955">Global CIO: Top 10 Tech Stories Of The Year: The Complete List</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228200126">Global CIO: HP CEO Leo Apotheker's Agenda: What Will He Do First?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900123">Global CIO: The Top 10 Most-Influential IT Vendors</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500422">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Swaps Cloud Rants For Cloud Love With Exalogic</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>2011-02-11T08:00:00ZGlobal CIO: Sam Palmisano Reveals Secret Behind IBM's Century Of SuccessIBM's chairman describes the power of culture and long-term thinking in his inaugural speech commemorating IBM's 100th birthday. http://www.informationweek.com/news/229216829?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsWe all know IBM used to make PCs--but did you know they also used to make clocks? And cheese slicers? Yes, IBM—currently the largest private-sector employer of mathematicians in the world—used to make cheese slicers. Sam Palmisano said so himself. In the first of what will become a global lecture series that's part of the IBM Centennial, Palmisano used the cheese-grater anecdote to underscore the core values and principles that have not only enabled the company to survive for a century, but also to enter its second hundred years more financially sound and better able to continue innovating than at any time in its storied history. Speaking to students at his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, Palmisano spoke broadly about the sometimes-painful efforts IBM has had to undertake over its lifetime to adapt to profound shifts in not just technology but also demographics, global dynamics, societal expectations, and the obligations that must be embraced by a company with 400,000 employees in 170 countries. Whether you admire or dislike IBM, and whether you think it's more or less innovative than it used to be, Palmisano's reflections on the company's remarkable experiences over that century, as well as his more-personal observations on his own leadership of IBM for almost all of the past decade, offer some marvelous insights into how today's organizations can exploit rather than fear the sweeping changes impacting our lives. So about those cheese slicers: in sharing that anecdote, Palmisano revealed the simple but profound secret behind IBM's success: "People who are familiar with our history are often struck not merely by our longevity, but with the fact that we have continually changed," Palmisano said. "We started off making clocks, scales and cheese slicers, in addition to the punched-card tabulator. After that, it's a blur: typewriters, vacuum tube calculators, magnetic tape, the first disk drive, the memory chip, FORTRAN, fractals, ATMs, mainframes, mini-computers, personal computers, supercomputers, services, software, analytics. Also, we've gone from operating in one country to more than 170. In some respects we're only now becoming a truly global enterprise." The deeper secret—and one that each of us should scrutinize rigorously within our own organizations—was revealed in Palmisano's explanation for why IBM didn't expand from its cheese-slicer roots into specialty maker of kitchen gadgets: "It is a constant reminder never to define ourselves by the things we make, no matter how successful they are today." That's a marvelous thought: simple to grasp, and apparently obvious. But those "obvious" things are often not obvious at all until someone else brings them to light. For each of us, in our own organizations: can we say, with clear consciences, that we never "define ourselves by the things we make, no matter how successful they are today"? That comment from Palmisano takes on even more significance when juxtaposed against the comments of a former IBM CEO, Thomas Watson, Jr., who was quoted by Palmisano as having said this 50 years ago:"I firmly believe that any organization, in order to survive and achieve success, must have a sound set of beliefs on which it premises all its policies and actions. Next, I believe that the most important single factor in corporate success is faithful adherence to those beliefs. And finally, I believe that if an organization is to meet the challenges of a changing world, it must be prepared to change everything about itself except those beliefs as it moves through corporate life." And then Palmisano added his own perspective on that comment from the man whose father founded IBM: "Let me repeat that last line: 'be prepared to change everything about itself except those beliefs.' "Tom Watson was not talking here about ethical precepts. For him, a company's beliefs were about its identity—what makes it distinct—what shapes its decisions and behaviors. If you could codify and sustain that core, it would ensure that the company remained unique and differentiated, decade after decade." And then Palmisano spoke of the power of relentless, customer-centric innovation: "In IBM's case, the need for continual forward movement is part of our business model. IBM's value proposition is to create and provide innovative solutions to our clients—solutions they can't get from anyone else. And because the frontier of what is truly innovative keeps moving, that compels us not to sit still. It is a constant reminder never to define ourselves by the things we make, no matter how successful they are today." At the top of this column, I noted that IBM used to make PCs. Indeed, while IBM was in that business for only 20 years, its PCs forged unprecedented levels of connections with individuals, as Palmisano noted: "It was by any measure the most recognizable brand for us—and arguably the only brand that touched individuals: tens of millions of people. For all these reasons, the idea that we would divest the PC business was, for many—pardon the pun—unthinkable." Yet that's exactly what IBM did because it foresaw the looming commoditization of the PC business and resolved across the company to put those core, long-term beliefs and culture spoken about by Watson 50 years ago ahead of the short-term "unthinkable" consequences. Here's Palmisano's rationale for that momentous decision: "We are innovators. In 1981 the PC was an innovation. Twenty years later it had lost much of its differentiation. It was time to move on—to the future. "Of course, every great company holds unique beliefs. But translating those beliefs into action: that is what separates the company from all others, and that is what keeps those beliefs alive. And that translation happens not in the realm of strategies or process—but of culture. "In this light, IBM's history can be seen as a century-long journey to create—and continually recreate—a culture. "Indeed, this was arguably Thomas Watson Sr.'s most enduring contribution to the world: the notion that an organization can—and must—undertake the intentional creation of a culture based on its beliefs or values." In closing, three final quick thoughts: 1) "Of the top 25 industrial corporations in the United States in 1900, only two remained on that list by 1961—one of those because it had absorbed six others from the original list. Two companies had disappeared, and the remaining 15 had slipped far behind." 2) "Of the top 25 companies on the Fortune 500 at the time of Watson’s lecture [1962], only four remained in 2010." 3) I urge you to read Palmisano's entire speech—you can find it <a href="http://www.ibm.com/ibm100/us/en/lectures/a_business_and_its_ideas.html">here</a>. RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229201238">Global CIO: IBM's Most Disruptive Acquisition Of 2010 Is Netezza</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228800683">Global CIO: An Open Letter To IBM CEO Sam Palmisano</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229205736">Global CIO: IBM On Oracle Exadata: It's A Hog To Install</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229001011">Global CIO: IBM Zings Oracle And HP Over Limited Vision</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229100408">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Will Need A Time Machine To Catch Us, Says IBM</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228000007">Global CIO: As IBM Accelerates Analytics Business, Can Anyone Keep Up?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223100019">Global CIO: Oracle Needs More Than Ellison's Talk To Beat IBM's Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223101319">Global CIO: IBM Claims Hardware Supremacy And Calls Out HP's Hurd</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226100133">Global CIO: IBM Doubles Down On Red-Hot Optimized Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226700424">Global CIO: IBM's Brilliant Trojan Horse Strategy Transcends Technology</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227001077">Global CIO: IBM Top Product Exec Discusses Strategy, Systems, & Oracle</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227200199">Global CIO: IBM's Blazing New Mainframe Wins Raves From Citigroup</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500100">Global CIO: Is IBM Or Apple The World's #1 Tech Brand?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500510">Global CIO: Larry Ellison And IBM Lead Surge In Optimized Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500833">Global CIO: IBM Turns Guns On Cisco With Acquisition Of Blade Network</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227501021">Global CIO: Tibco Surges And CIO Flips Off IBM, Oracle, And SAP</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900123">Global CIO: The Top 10 Most Influential IT Vendors (Apple And Facebook?)</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221600338">Global CIO: IBM CEO Sam Palmisano Talks With Global CIO</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223800065">Global CIO: Why IBM CEO Sam Palmisano Earned His $24.3 Million</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>2011-02-10T08:00:00ZGlobal CIO: Oracle's Mark Hurd Calls Out Deadly IT StrategiesHurd outlined several world-shaking trends while speaking with some of Oracle's largest financial-services customers and prospects.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229211386?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsIn a wide-ranging conversation with Oracle's financial-services customers and prospects yesterday, president Mark Hurd stressed that the next decade or two will bring profound changes in where wealth is created around the globe and in the ways technology can help—or hinder—companies seeking to exploit that opportunity. Pointing to Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey as among the next wave of high-growth countries, Hurd predicted that those lands will lead the next great wave of wealth creation created by innovative companies whose products and services and ideas are consumed around the world. "There's a big change in where wealth is going to be created," Hurd said. "If you were hanging around high income countries like this one for the past 20 to 25 years, you're probably in a good place. But in the future, if you want to be somewhere interesting, try" some of the emerging markets he highlighted. Success in those rapidly evolving markets will require different skills, different outlooks, and different technological capabilities than those that underpinned the American century (my term, not his), Hurd said, and winners and losers will be determined in large part by how they view and deploy IT in ways that lets them keep pace with customers. Hurd touted Oracle's belief that competitive advantage will accrue to those companies that can liberate increasing percentages of their IT spending from internal integrations and maintenance, and then plow those funds into innovation and growth-oriented opportunities. And Hurd predicted that companies unable or unwilling to climb out of the eternal-integration rut "will lose." Those stuck-in-the-past enterprises will first lose their ability to keep up with and delight customers, Hurd said, and then they'll lose those customers, and then they'll lose in the marketplace because they simply can't move at the speed that a massively urbanized and mobilized economy will demand. How mobilized? Exactly one year from now, Hurd said, the planet Earth will be populated by more mobile phones than people. It was a fascinating exchange as Hurd, who spoke for about 15 minutes and then took questions from the audience, was making a case that must have seemed downright radical—if not heretical—to executives from some of the country's largest banks, insurance companies, and capital-markets firms. Because, at the heart of his remarks, Hurd was suggesting to that very high-level audience that they need to begin stepping away from the vendor-arbitrage strategy that has been a mainstay of corporate IT buying for the past 20 or 30 years. Those big financial-services companies have spent those last few decades assembling the Noah's Ark of technology:Two of everything of every type of every species from every corner of the globe. And they've done that because their unshakable belief is that to do otherwise—to purchase from a significantly smaller set IT partners—would shift too much power and control and lock-in potential into the hands of those preferred vendors. But meanwhile, Hurd said, the hidden and insidious cost of that policy has come in the form of massive IT teams forced to plow through endless integration, endless configuration, endless tuning, and endless testing. The solution, argued Hurd, is a more homogeneous stack in which everything from servers to databases to middleware to applications to storage and more is optimized for ease of installation and configuration. "We take over ownership of that cost," Hurd said, allowing customers to refocus their people and time away from internal busywork and toward customer-facing growth initiatives and engagements. In saying that, Hurd emphasized—repeatedly—that Oracle is as open as any IT company in the market and will happily work with other vendors as specified by customers. But he also gently noted that those heterogeneous configurations can't tap into the "secret sauce" of optimization that comes from having deep engineering-level integration at all levels of interaction. Here are a few other compelling points made by Hurd in his opening remarks or during the Q&A session: The customer-expectation gap: Hurd relayed a funny story about driving to the airport with his daughter and and being "impressed" that when he made a phone call to try to find out at what gate an incoming flight would be arriving, he was greeted by a voice-recognition system instead of having to wait interminably for a human being to answer. "I thought, wow, this is great—this is real progress," he said with a laugh. "Of course, the voice-recognition system didn't work at all—I'd say, 'San Francisco' and it would ask, 'San Diego?' over and over. But to me, even though it didn't work, that was progress because my generation was trained to expect and accept bad customer service. My daughter looked at me and said that I'm the only person in the world who would try to do that," and she then used her iPhone to get the gate information in a few seconds. So as this new always-on, always-connected generation comes of age, Hurd says, companies will have to find ways to rapidly and elegantly close that yawning expectation gap in customer service. Vertical-market extensions of Exadata? Hurd said the Exadata phenomenon has been extraordinary and that Oracle is looking at a range of ways to further exploit the potential of the fastest-growing product in the company's history. It's not always IT's fault: Hurd chuckled as he relayed some experiences in which CEOs are all too eager to their IT organizations for whatever is ailing the company. And as the pace of global business accelerates, he said, this misconnection or disconnection between what the business needs and what IT is being asked to deliver can be deadly. The iPhone as optimized system: Hurd used Apple's hugely successful device as an example of a consumer-market analog to Exadata, describing how the software and hardware are engineered from the ground up to work together beautifully. (For additional insights and more-extensive verbatim comments from Hurd, please check out <a href="http://www.insurancetech.com/blogs/229208642">this article</a> from my colleagues at Insurance & Technology, and <a href="http://banktech.com/blogs/229208381">this article</a> from my colleagues at Bank Systems & Technology.) RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228900228">Global CIO: Larry Ellison's 10-Point Plan For World Domination</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228702008">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Vows To 'Go After' HP; Is Alliance Dead?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000158">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Should Acquire Dell (And 10 Other Crackpot Ideas)</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228800609">Global CIO: Is Larry Ellison Hurting Oracle By Hammering Competitors?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228800776">Global CIO: Oracle Seeks New Whipping Boy As SAP Thrives</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227600142">Global CIO: Larry Ellison's Heightened Attacks On HP Doom Alliance</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227600117">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Puts HP In Crosshairs Via Slap At New CEO</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228000108">Global CIO: In Larry Ellison's Legal Battle With SAP, HP Is Collateral Damage</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227501133">Global CIO: HP CEO Apotheker Has Deep Expertise But Checkered History</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227701035">Global CIO: Are HP And SAP Perfect Match Or Train Wreck?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=225600107">Global CIO: Hewlett-Packard's Missing Link Is Analytics</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226600197">Global CIO: Burying Mark Hurd: Hewlett-Packard And Its Future</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226700009">Global CIO: Hewlett-Packard's CEO: The Top 10 Challenges</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226900135">Global CIO: Has HP Found Its Next CEO?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227300216">Global CIO: Larry Ellison And Mark Hurd: The Job Interview</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227300223">Global CIO: Resurrecting Mark Hurd: Larry Ellison's War With IBM</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227400105">Global CIO: Gunning For IBM And Oracle, HP Plans Optimized Systems Blitz</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500934">Global CIO: HP's $130-Billion Gamble</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227600036">Global CIO: An Open Letter To HP CEO Leo Apotheker</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900435">Global CIO: Top 10 Most Influential Vendors, Part 2 (Microsoft And HP?)</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228000323">Global CIO: Can HP's CEO Survive? The Board Talks It Over</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228200126">Global CIO: HP CEO Leo Apotheker's Agenda: What Will He Do First?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228500123">Global CIO: IBM Details Raids On Customers From HP And Oracle</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>2011-02-09T08:00:00ZGlobal CIO: IBM On Oracle Exadata: It's A Hog To Install IBM product chief Steve Mills delivers unique insights on analytics, acquisitions, and archrival Larry Ellison and Oracle.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229205736?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsWhen it comes to deep insight on customer engagements and expectations, and the ability of the IT industry to meet those needs, few people in this business can match the expertise of IBM group executive Steve Mills. And in a recent Q&A interview with TheDeal.com, Mills shared some of that wisdom via a range of opinions and insights covering how IBM evaluates and manages acquisitions, the power of analytics, and the additional responsibility Mills took on six months ago when the longtime head of IBM's software business also assumed responsibility for all of the company's hardware as well. Among the topics TheDeal.com asked Mills about was Oracle, and Mills offered some compelling opinions on the complex relationship and marketplace dynamics that exist between these two companies that are simultaneously long-term strategic partners and also ferocious competitors. I'll offer a sampling of Mills' thoughts on Oracle and Larry Ellison, and then move on to other bits of wisdom and insight from the article. (For some deeper analysis of Mills's outlooks and strategic perspectives, please see our column from six months ago called <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227001077">Global CIO: IBM Top Product Exec Discusses Strategy, Systems, And Oracle</a>.) The perspectives are particularly germane because IBM and Oracle battle head to head for CIOs' hearts and wallets in everything from databases to middleware to large systems and, more recently, workload-optimized systems, and each of those categories are becoming more strategically vital in today's information-driven world. These are the two most-influential enterprise IT companies in the world and their approaches, their products, and their strategies do indeed matter. And while Steve Mills, as one of IBM's top executives, is surely subjective on the matter, his perspectives are nonetheless valuable because they illuminate how the companies think and where they're headed. Asked in the Deal.com interview about Oracle and Ellison, Mills's response included these remarks: On Oracle and Larry Ellison: "Customers want better time-to-value. Nothing Oracle delivers is fast to deliver. It takes weeks to install an Exadata box [Oracle's database server product]. This 'all-in-one' idea that shows up in Larry's ideas and ads in reality requires a lot of labor. We are a primary provider of that labor to that market; we have a huge services business that revolves around the technologies that Oracle creates." And for more on why Mills thinks Exadata requires expensive and lengthy installations, you can read the whole Q&A <a href="http://www.thedeal.com/magazine/ID/038254/2011/ibm%27s-soft-side.php">here</a>. On Netezza and data warehousing: "One of the reasons we acquired Netezza, we recognized that customers have built hundreds of thousands of data marts and data warehouses, not necessarily having procured the data consistently. Netezza has a very nice model for a prepackaged data warehouse that improves consistency. We saw a lot of power in that." (For a deep analysis of IBM's strategy with Netezza, please check out our column from earlier this week called <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229201238">Global CIO: IBM's Most Disruptive Acquisition In 2010 Is Netezza</a>.) The power of measuring real-time public sentiment: "Public sentiment can be measured and captured almost in real time. If you're a retailer or consumer packaged-goods company, you think a lot about what people think about a product you are putting out or planning to put out." The value of Twitter-stream analyses: "Tweets are unstructured, but I need to understand what is in a tweet and apply value to the adverbs and adjectives and nouns and create a rating structure on relative sentiment on any particular topic." On IBM's extensive acquisition list in analytics: "We are the company that invented the disk drive and the database. We run the world's largest private enterprise math department at IBM Research. But for as much as we develop, we can't seem to get it all fast enough." On what's difficult about acquisitions : "I worry more about integrations and how we will leverage an acquisition. The easy part of buying companies is buying; the hard part is creating a value equation better than what the company could have done on its own." On IBM putting all hardware under his control: "Sam Palmisano asked me to take this one, recognizing that, looking ahead, we need to continue enhancing hardware design. Customers don't see [hardware and software] as separate technologies." RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229201238">Global CIO: IBM's Most Disruptive Acquisition Is Netezza</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227001077">Global CIO: IBM Top Product Exec Discusses Strategy, Systems, And Oracle</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228800683">Global CIO: An Open Letter To IBM CEO Sam Palmisano</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229001011">Global CIO: IBM Zings Oracle And HP Over Limited Vision</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229100408">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Will Need A Time Machine To Catch Us, Says IBM</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228000007">Global CIO: As IBM Accelerates Analytics Business, Can Anyone Keep Up?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223100019">Global CIO: Oracle Needs More Than Ellison's Talk To Beat IBM's Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223101319">Global CIO: IBM Claims Hardware Supremacy And Calls Out HP's Hurd</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226100133">Global CIO: IBM Doubles Down On Red-Hot Optimized Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227200199">Global CIO: IBM's Blazing New Mainframe Wins Raves From Citigroup</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500100">Global CIO: Is IBM Or Apple The World's #1 Tech Brand?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500510">Global CIO: Larry Ellison And IBM Lead Surge In Optimized Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500833">Global CIO: IBM Turns Guns On Cisco With Acquisition Of Blade Network</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900123">Global CIO: The Top 10 Most Influential IT Vendors (Apple And Facebook?)</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221600338">Global CIO: IBM CEO Sam Palmisano Talks With Global CIO</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223800065">Global CIO: Why IBM CEO Sam Palmisano Earned His $24.3 Million</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>2011-02-08T08:00:00ZGlobal CIO: FCC's 'Net Neutrality' Scam Is Dead On ArrivalThe FCC's brazen power grab aimed at jamming bureaucracy down businesses's throats will be stifled by the new pro-growth Congress.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229203012?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsQuick: name a company in any industry that's not dependent in some way on the Internet for sales, communication with customers, collaboration, scheduling, marketing, bill payments, commerce, and so on. In our online-powered world, that list of companies totally detached from the Internet would be incredibly small. But all the rest of us—the remaining 99.8%--are on the verge of having that indispensable Internet regulated, stifled, babysat, and compromised by a rogue Federal Communications Commission whose imminent power grab over the Internet is coming in defiance of courtroom decisions and in the absence of Congressional authorization. What's particularly insidious is that the supporters of this power grab to hamstring the Internet by placing it under bureaucratic control are calling their scheme "net neutrality." But three months ago at election time, the American people had a chance to let their voices be heard on whether they wanted to let a bunch of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats begin smothering the Internet, and the results could not have been more clear: as we <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228200528">wrote in November</a>, 95 candidates for Congressional office signed a petition expressing their support for "net neutrality," and every single one of those 95 "net neutrality"-supporting candidates was defeated. So in that spirit, I'm going to drop the 1984-ish war-is-peace terminology of "net neutrality" and from here on out call it what it actually is: Internet regulation. But, clever schemers that they are, the supporters of governmental regulation of the Internet know that their efforts would never have a chance of succeeding if they used such plain talk, and instead they try to frame their arguments with gasball nonsense like this sentence that was a part of that suicidal pledge signed by those 95 candidates before the last election (oh—and did I mention that all 95 of those candidates who pledged to support governmental regulation of the Internet were defeated at the polls?):"In Congress, I'll fight to protect Net Neutrality for the entire Internet—wired and wireless—and make sure big corporations aren't allowed to take control of free speech online." Well, well, well—who knew that iTunes was simply Apple's effort to control free speech? Or that Amazon was stifling your ability to express your opinions? Or that Facebook—and with a valuation in the tens of billions, Facebook is certainly a "big corporation"—was in business to tell you what you can and can't say? So in the face of such absurdity, I'd like to point to two sources of information about the insidious and potentially devastating impacts that "net neutrality"—whoops! I mean, governmental regulation of the Internet—could have on the American industry, and about what our new Congress is doing to try to walk back the brazen and totally unauthorized usurpation of power by FCC chairman Julius Genachowski. The first is a <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704353504575596562893007720.html">lucid and insightful column</a> from the Wall Street Journal by L. Gordon Crovitz called "Net Neutrality Goes 0 for 95." And the second is <a href="http://online.wsj.com/video/opinion-journal-obamacare-takes-another-licking/EE7A6F63-011D-4B14-BD23-CFFA14480E9B.html?mod=WSJ_article_related">a video interview with Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn</a>, R., Tennessee, conducted by the Journal last week and in which Blackburn laid out the steps Congress is taking to thwart, block, and then outlaw the statist actions of Genachowski and the FCC with regard to the Internet (the relevant portion of the video interview begins at the 6:20 mark). Blackburn's position is pegged to the interests of the business community and she speaks passionately about the need to keep the government and busybodies like Genachowski from doing harm to the ability of U.S. companies to compete in the global economy. Here are some of her comments from my transcript of the interview: On the false premise with which Genachowski and other supporters of governmental regulation of the Internet are basing their actions: "The reaction has been being aware that the Internet is not broken, and it does not need FCC intervention. The Internet service providers have bid on spectrum, they have built out that spectrum, they have maintained that spectrum, and they spend about $60 billion a year in capital investment on this. So we don't have a broken marketplace, if you will; it is working, most people are very satisfied with their ability to access both the wireline and the wireless avenues for their Internet use. "The third thing I think we need to realize is the FCC doing this, and coming in and trying to capture this marketplace—basically, it is the Fairness Doctrine for the Internet. And we do not want the FCC assigning priority and value to content that's going to travel through the pipes. " On the need to keep federal bureaucrats out of the way of free-market entrepreneurs and high-tech innovators: "Likewise, we don't want our nation's inventors and innovators to have to go apply with the FCC to a "Federal Bureau of Applications" if they want to create some type of innovation that has a portal on the Internet, whether it's with healthcare or financial services or retail transactions or security and cybersecurity. We want them to be able to innovate, and keeping the Internet free, open, and accessible is going to be very important." On steps she and other members of Congress are taking to ensure the "net neutrality" farce is dead on arrival: "I think we'll do a lot of due diligence and bring some legislation and invoke Congressional review, cut the money off so the agencies can't use it to implement these rules and regulations that are hampering American business and free enterprise." On how they'll do that: "Step #2 is going through the appropriations process and disallowing funds to be spent for items like the FCC implementing 'Net Neutrality,' or at EPA the undertaking of Cap and Trade under the Clean Air Act—we can do that through appropriations. Congressman Culberson out of Texas is going to lead the effort on disallowing the FCC to use their funds. . . . My legislation, HR 91, would block the FCC from implementing the 'net neutrality' rules and would say, 'You can't do this—that authority runs with Congress, is held with Congress'. . . . we do not want our creative economy and our technology sector to be hampered like our industrial sector was with onerous rules that made it almost impossible in many areas to manufacture here in this country." Sunshine, says the bromide, is the best disinfectant. And the more we the people and American businesses get to know about the lie expressed in the phony term "net neutrality" and the adverse impacts it could have on U.S. competitiveness, the more we are convinced that we want nothing to do with governmental regulation of the Internet or with the bureaucrats and politicians who are trying to ram it down our throats. RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229201238">Global CIO: IBM's Most Disruptive Acquisition Of 2010 Is Netezza</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228800683">Global CIO: An Open Letter To IBM CEO Sam Palmisano</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228200528">Global CIO: 'Net Neutrality' A Ballot Bomb: Supporters Shellacked At Polls</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229001011">Global CIO: IBM Zings Oracle And HP Over Limited Vision</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229100408">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Will Need A Time Machine To Catch Us, Says IBM</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228000007">Global CIO: As IBM Accelerates Analytics Business, Can Anyone Keep Up?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223100019">Global CIO: Oracle Needs More Than Ellison's Talk To Beat IBM's Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223101319">Global CIO: IBM Claims Hardware Supremacy And Calls Out HP's Hurd</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226100133">Global CIO: IBM Doubles Down On Red-Hot Optimized Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226700424">Global CIO: IBM's Brilliant Trojan Horse Strategy Transcends Technology</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227001077">Global CIO: IBM Top Product Exec Discusses Strategy, Systems, & Oracle</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227200199">Global CIO: IBM's Blazing New Mainframe Wins Raves From Citigroup</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500100">Global CIO: Is IBM Or Apple The World's #1 Tech Brand?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500510">Global CIO: Larry Ellison And IBM Lead Surge In Optimized Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500833">Global CIO: IBM Turns Guns On Cisco With Acquisition Of Blade Network</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227501021">Global CIO: Tibco Surges And CIO Flips Off IBM, Oracle, And SAP</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900123">Global CIO: The Top 10 Most Influential IT Vendors (Apple And Facebook?)</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221600338">Global CIO: IBM CEO Sam Palmisano Talks With Global CIO</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223800065">Global CIO: Why IBM CEO Sam Palmisano Earned His $24.3 Million</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>2011-02-07T12:00:00ZGlobal CIO: Salesforce.com Rides Chatter Momentum Toward $2 BillionSalesforce's expanding product set and soaring enterprise sales make it the most influential cloud-software company in the world.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229201270?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsSalesforce.com's fiscal fourth-quarter revenue will top $450 million and its torrid 25% annual growth rate will continue this year on the strength of the company's "ever-expanding cloud portfolio," a leading software analyst said in a research note Sunday. That bullish projection from UBS research director Brent Thill is the latest addition to the remarkable momentum and buzz surrounding Salesforce.com over the past few months as a wave of new products, greater acceptance among large enterprises, and the recruitment of an IBM sales executive to further expand large-company penetration are combining to push this leading cloud-software provider to the brink of a $2 billion revenue run rate. "We believe CRM (Salesforce.com's stock symbol) will deliver FQ4 revenues above guidance and consensus as strength was driven by strong year-end buying/budget flush, momentum drafting off early December user conference, increased penetration of large enterprises (including new logos), lower churn, and broadening acceptance of Cloud-based apps," wrote Thill. The company's new social collaboration tool, Chatter, isn't yet a revenue driver itself but it's impact has been extensive, notes Thill: "Chatter has been highly successful as 'server pings' went from <1% of transactions in October '10 to >13% in January '11." For Salesforce.com, that type of interaction is essential for Chatter as it joins several competitors seeking to capitalize on the social-networking phenomenon to provide an enterprise-strength version that will significantly change how knowledge workers find information, consume applications and resultant findings, and communicate with colleagues, customers, and partners. More broadly, the range and volume of interactions and transactions that Salesforce is managing for its 87,200 customers is expanding, Thill said, which is a clear indication that the company's cloud-based applications and platform are burrowing more deeply inside mission-critical processes for corporations. "Daily transaction volume hit record levels last week," Thill wrote, "and are sustaining year-to-year percentage growth rates in the high 70s." In concert with that more-extensive use of its products, Salesforce.com has also begun changing and expanding the way it describes itself to the world in an effort to change the perception that it's a one-trick pony that does cloud-based CRM and little else. Here's the company's latest version of its "About salesforce.com" description:"Salesforce.com is the trusted enterprise cloud computing company. Based on salesforce.com's real-time, multitenant architecture, the company's Force.com platform and apps (http://www.salesforce.com/crm) have revolutionized the way companies collaborate and communicate. Salesforce.com's cloud offerings include: "The Sales Cloud, for sales force automation and contact management; The Service Cloud, for customer service and support; The Jigsaw Data Cloud, for ensuring data integrity and quality; Salesforce Chatter, for social collaboration; The Force.com platform, for custom application development; Database.com, the world's first enterprise cloud database; and The AppExchange, the world's leading marketplace for enterprise cloud computing apps." (End of excerpt.) And to help lead its efforts to have more large organizations adopt more of those cloud-based enterprise tools, Salesforce.com last week named former IBM software-sales executive Jeff Lautenbach to the newly created position of senior VP of enterprise commercial sales, Americas. In a <a href="http://investor.salesforce.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=141811&p=irol-newsArticle&t=Regular&id=1524777&">press release</a> announcing that move, Salesforce.com said Lautenbach will "lead salesforce.com in its efforts to bring the power of cloud computing to large enterprises" and help those corporations "embrace social, mobile and open cloud computing." Lautenbach himself was quoted as saying something akin to what we've been touting for the past two years here at Global CIO: "Large enterprises have a tremendous opportunity to transform the focus of their IT departments from maintenance mode to being drivers of innovation across their organizations. . . . I look forward to working with some of the world's leading CIOs to make their visions for IT in the 21st century a reality." RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500545">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Sparring With Marc Benioff? Priceless.</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222400004">Global CIO: Salesforce.com CEO Benioff On Beating Microsoft And SAP In The Cloud</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222400399">Global CIO: Salesforce.com CEO Benioff On IT Scams And Cloud Power</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500196">Global CIO: Oracle Launches 'Cloud In A Box' And New Cloud Business</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500184">Global CIO: At Oracle Open World, Oracle Commits To Cloud Computing</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=225200363">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Embraces Cloud Computing's 'Idiocy'</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>2011-02-07T08:00:00ZGlobal CIO: IBM's Most Disruptive Acquisition Of 2010 Is NetezzaThe Top 10 reasons why Netezza's shaking things up inside and outside of IBM—including some tough talk for Larry Ellison and Exadata.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229201238?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsAmong the numerous acquisitions IBM made last year, the one that's having the biggest impact both inside IBM and outside in the industry is shaking up the ways in which customers regard their data, how they try to extract higher levels of business value from those data, and how they're beginning to exploit those data relentlessly to peer into the future and pounce on revenue opportunities. Six months ago, IBM announced its intention to acquire Netezza for $1.7 billion, and that disclosure came right in the middle of Oracle Open World—perhaps a coincidence, and perhaps not. Two months later the deal was closed, and since then Netezza's high-growth revenue trajectory has only accelerated within IBM's expansive information-management and analytics family. After chatting with IBM Netezza CEO Jim Baum last week, I've pulled out from Baum's comments a range of timely ideas that help bring some perspective to the rapidly evolving and often-intersecting areas of data warehousing, purpose-built appliances, business analytics, Big Data, and how companies are trying to leverage all of that to turn insight into foresight. I'll share those in just a moment but first let me offer some quick context on Netezza. Baum offers a compelling point of view on those developments: in mid-2010, analysts were forecasting that standalone Netezza would finish the calendar year with revenue of about $250 million or $260 million. But just a few months later, Netezza had become part of an iconic $100 billion global corporation that has for the past few years been banging the drum loudly for the entire industry about the power of data and analytics and their role in IBM's mega-theme of Smarter Planet. IBM Netezza's top priority, said Baum, is "to preserve the elements that fundamentally differentiate Netezza in the marketplace for our customers: our price-performance, our total cost of ownership, and being very easy to do business with. We want to preserve and enhance all those traditional attributes, and there's a lot of activity going on within IBM to help us achieve and expand upon all that." And there's also a parallel effort to crank up every facet of Netezza's operations to be able to fully exploit the huge opportunity both companies see as customers place greater value on their data and on their ability to extract from it powerful looks into the future. "As we were coming into IBM, Netezza's at about 500 employees—but by the end of the year, we want to have that over 850, including doubling the size of our field organization with the folks to are selling and supporting the products," Baum said, chuckling a bit at the scaling power that IBM can deliver but that would have been unfathomable for Netezza as a standalone company. Additional investments are being made in expanding the company's analytics reseller channel and in strengthening ties with ISVs for industry-specific solutions. "That's not just software companies within IBM but also very significant partners like SAP's Business Objects, Informatica, MicroStrategy, and other key ecosystem partners," Baum said. Against that backdrop, here's my analysis of the Top 10 reasons why Netezza is IBM's most disruptive acquisition from 2010—and I'll roll them out in ascending order, starting with #10 and moving up to #1:#10: Helps IBM push back on Oracle's aggressive Exadata claims. Asked how he'd contrast Netezza's technology and marketing approach with those of Oracle, Baum said, "First, Exadata's positioned solely as technology, not as a business solution, and second, Oracle wants it to be all things to all people. As Oracle tells it, Exadata's the answer for everything: it's the answer for OLTP, it's the answer for analytics, and for data warehousing, and on and on. The problem is, it's not a one-size-fits-all world out there. And if you try to build a one-size-fits-all solution like Oracle's done, all you're really going to do is create an extraordinarily complex environment because you expect the system to be able to do all sorts of things, instead of doing just one thing really, really well. And we all know that complexity drives up the cost, it leads to long time to value, and you spend all your time tuning it and getting all the pieces to work correctly." #9: Tangibly underscores IBM's role in workload-optimized systems. While IBM has been taking the integrated hardware-software approach for some time, its marketing has lagged its technology in telling that story—and Netezza's unadulterated commitment to optimized systems and appliances should help IBM communicate its position more effectively. "I would argue that IBM's been on the workload-optimized path for a long time," Baum said, "and that's really core to how IBM's always thought about systems." True, but I still think that tradition and that sense of unvarnished commitment is much more widely known and believed inside IBM than outside—and I also think that one of the reasons IBM has elected to keep the Netezza name is to hammer home that commitment to the outside world. #8: Powerful synergy from small customer overlap. "We're coming into IBM with a very strong market position," Baum said, "because we've been completely focused on one thing, and that has been defining the idea of an information appliance and specifically a data warehousing appliance. One of the things IBM saw very early on when we began talking with them about an acquisition was the strong customer base we have with global companies like NTT Docomo, MetroPCS, Nielsen, Acxiom, and many more. We also both learned that there's not a tremendous amount of overlap with IBM's customer base from a data warehousing perspective, and that creates a real opportunity for us to collectively expand on the customer relationships that IBM has and that Netezza has beyond our data warehousing and business analytics specialty and into other areas of information management." #7: Creates substantial global growth opportunities for IBM. "As you know, IBM has been very focused on growth markets around the world, from the BRIC countries to other fast-growing geographies. And at Netezza, while we always believed we had something strong to offer in those markets, we just didn't have the scale to pursue all of those. So in a few cases in those growth markets, we had a foothold, but more often it would be more accurately called a toehold," Baum said with a laugh. "So part of the investment IBM's making in Netezza is in growth and scale on the international stage, and that's very exciting for the team here because while our story's been built around growth, it's just totally different now being inside IBM. . . . Our last three months were was a formal part of IBM and we're wrapping up our best year ever by far—we've exceeded plan by a substantial amount." Next up are some thoughts on where the IT appliance business is headed:#6: Clarifying the role of purpose-built appliances. With a flurry of entrants into the field, CIOs should be prepared to fend off the next dopey acronyms that are sure to surface: AaaS, or "appliances as a service," and EaaA, as in "everything as an appliance." Conversely, Netezza's clarity of mission since its inception about 10 years ago will help lend some rigor to our understanding of what a purpose-built appliance is, and what it is not. Baum put it this way: "We've been a pioneer in building appliances for data warehousing—in fact we coined that term—and since our founding, that's been our core and our sole focus. At the heart of it, such an appliance provides a certain value proposition that has this as its core differentiation: not just excellent performance but also excellent price-performance and low total cost of ownership that we are able to deliver based on our promise of simplicity, ease of use, and the elimination of administrative overhead," Baum said. "We've built the company on the idea of building an appliance and on doing business like an appliance vendor, and we think that's very important because it requires that you really embrace the ideas of simplicity in your products and in your business model." #5: Business analytics is next game-changing IT innovation. "I've felt for some time now that the next significant technology-based performance improver is business analytics," Baum said. "The technology curve with enterprise software has moved from fundamental reporting to ERP to virtualization, and all of those have been great in their times, but the the industry right now is at a place where the technology is advanced enough where the next substantial shift and game-changer that the IT world can bring to business is analytics. For us, that fits very well within IBM and its top-down Smarter Planet position and IBM's ability to really connect with customers on business-value improvement. We worked with IBM for years as a very close partner, but now we're inside that ecosystem and we have a chance to gain some incredible leverage across IBM and all of their capabilities." #4: Further validation of the power of optimized systems. While Baum on a couple of occasions stressed that archrival Oracle's strategy is all about technology and a one-size-fits-all approach, I think Oracle—and Larry Ellison in particular—has done more than any other company to create and amplify the current buzz among customers for the potential of highly engineered and deeply integrated purpose-built systems. Oracle's gone so far as to make it the central message in the company's new branding: "Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together." What we are likely seeing here is a bifurcation among those optimized systems with one category typified by systems like Exadata or Teradata's high-end products, while the second grouping could become the appliance category, featuring products that are relatively less expensive and not as powerful but that also deliver the appliance-specific attributes Baum described above: simplicity of operation, minimal administration, and aggressive TCO. #3: Exploiting data as assets from which business value is generated. "We have customers who are looking to optimize the real estate on the Internet, or their analyses of clinical healthcare trials, or smartgrids, or truck routes," Baum said. "The common thread across all of those is the concept of Big Data as the underlying enabler because in some industries we're approaching a level of technical sophistication where they can have something approaching ubiquitous data collection from all this sensing detection at the point of use—it's just exploding." For some companies, that'll just mean ever-larger storage purchases to hold all that new data, but aggressive and forward-looking companies will look at those data as a prized raw materials that, with the right analytical tools, can be mined, refined, and turned into cash. "With these vast data-gathering systems, in the best companies their data goes through their analytical systems and comes back as increasingly valuable assets from which new business value is generated," Baum said. "So for our customers, now that we're a part of IBM we're engaging with not only the technology people on simplicity and integration but also the CEO and the CFO and the revenue owners because we believe the next big wave—very big wave—of business productivity will be from analytics. And we have to be able to tell customers how to do that." So is it time for business analytics for the masses? Here's Netezza's perspective on that:#2: Advancing the cause of business analytics for the masses. Here's where the IBM connection will really pay off for Netezza in helping customers map out strategies for getting the right information and insights out to the proper people at the optimal time and in the optimal context. While Netezza has built itself on delivering data warehouse appliances, it's the output of those appliances—the business analytics and their insights and ideas and discoveries—that reflect the real potential of IBM Netezza. As Baum said, "From the beginning, a big part of the Netezza vision has been introducing business analytics to the masses. Now that we're a part of IBM, we expect to help make that happen much, much faster." #1: Shifting business's focus from rearview mirror to the future. In the next few years, this is the behavior that will separate winning companies from losers, and even survivors from those that enter the one-way death spiral. It's nice to have someone be able to exercise hindsight in explaining why such and such happened last month, last quarter or last year, but it's not enough: the best companies will be able to use analytics to reverse the arrow of time and look into what's coming in the future instead of just hashing over and rationalizing what's already occurred. "The term of BI, unfortunately, given the early genesis of the term, has come to mean reporting and dashboarding," Baum said. "And while those are very important, they've also become sort of foundational because most companies are already doing it. And that means most BI value today is historical in nature and is all about looking in the rearview mirror. But, the way business analytics and optimization are heading, it's much more toward the forward-looking and actionable information—the advanced analytics and more predictive solutions and the business impact they can have." RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228800683">Global CIO: An Open Letter To IBM CEO Sam Palmisano</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229001011">Global CIO: IBM Zings Oracle And HP Over Limited Vision</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229100408">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Will Need A Time Machine To Catch Us, Says IBM</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228000007">Global CIO: As IBM Accelerates Analytics Business, Can Anyone Keep Up?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223100019">Global CIO: Oracle Needs More Than Ellison's Talk To Beat IBM's Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223101319">Global CIO: IBM Claims Hardware Supremacy And Calls Out HP's Hurd</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226100133">Global CIO: IBM Doubles Down On Red-Hot Optimized Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226700424">Global CIO: IBM's Brilliant Trojan Horse Strategy Transcends Technology</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227001077">Global CIO: IBM Top Product Exec Discusses Strategy, Systems, & Oracle</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227200199">Global CIO: IBM's Blazing New Mainframe Wins Raves From Citigroup</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500100">Global CIO: Is IBM Or Apple The World's #1 Tech Brand?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500510">Global CIO: Larry Ellison And IBM Lead Surge In Optimized Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500833">Global CIO: IBM Turns Guns On Cisco With Acquisition Of Blade Network</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227501021">Global CIO: Tibco Surges And CIO Flips Off IBM, Oracle, And SAP</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900123">Global CIO: The Top 10 Most Influential IT Vendors (Apple And Facebook?)</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221600338">Global CIO: IBM CEO Sam Palmisano Talks With Global CIO</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223800065">Global CIO: Why IBM CEO Sam Palmisano Earned His $24.3 Million</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>2011-02-05T10:01:00ZGlobal CIO: Apple Faces Mounting Pressure On Steve Jobs Succession PlanWhile Jobs's request for privacy during medical leave is logical, Apple investors have a right to want more transparency than Apple's offering.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229201237?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsFor Apple, the glorious thing about being a publicly traded company is that profound investor confidence in the company's ongoing ability to deliver marvelous new products with fantastic revenue streams has pushed the company's market cap to about $320 billion as of Saturday morning. At the same time, the not-so-glorious counterpoint for Apple is that investors and other market influencers expect that in return for the capital they're plowing into the company's stock, Apple will be as forthcoming as necessary about its business and key issues affecting its prospects. And so it is that Apple is facing mounting pressure to be more transparent about its succession-planning policies in light of Steve Jobs's current medical leave of absence, his second in the last two years. While no one—at least yet—is claiming that Apple has to or even should disclose more details regarding the nature of Jobs's current illness, Apple will certainly be expected to describe in greater detail how it is at least considering how it would operate if Jobs has to be replaced as CEO. It's a highly sensitive issue, isn't it: on the one hand, Jobs is very likely in a battle for survival, and has asked that his family's privacy be respected during this most difficult time. On the other hand, he has been the primary animating force behind Apple's incredible resurgence over the past decade and its ascendancy to a spot among the best-known and most-revered brands in the world. And therefore he's been an incredibly important factor—without question, the most important factor—behind Apple's remarkable success and its heady market cap of $320 billion. So investors clearly have a right to some answers: what is Apple's plan if Jobs can't return as CEO? Who will run the company? How will Apple fill the void that this almost-mythical icon would leave? A Wall Street Journal <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704709304576124153437752970.html?mod=WSJ_newsreel_business">news article yesterday</a> cited comments from proxy advisory firm about the complex situation involving Apple and Jobs:Apple Inc. should disclose its succession plans for Chief Executive Steve Jobs, an influential proxy advisory firm said in a report backing a shareholder proposal. Institutional Shareholder Services said all companies should have succession plans in place, and Apple shareholders would benefit by having a report on the company's succession plans disclosed annually. "Such a report would enable shareholders to judge the board on its readiness and willingness to meet the demands of succession planning based on the circumstances at that time," ISS said. Apple wasn't available to comment. Apple has been reluctant to talk publicly about its plans for when Mr. Jobs has left the company, even though the company's image, products and direction are closely tied to its top executive. (End of excerpt.) The scenario presented by ISS would not attempt to compel Apple to divulge truly proprietary information such as names of CEO candidates, but it would require Apple to release details of its overall succession plan, the article said. It would include such information as "criteria for the CEO position that reflect Apple's business strategy" and would require Apple's board to "identify internal candidates and produce an annual report on the succession plan," the article said. "In addition, the proposal wants the board to begin nonemergency CEO succession planning at least three years before an expected transition, as well as maintain an emergency plan." That all seems to make sense, right? But as my colleague Paul McDougall wrote recently about the secrecy surrounding Jobs's condition and the ripple effect that could have on shareholders, one former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission says Apple's board is acting precisely as it should. From McDougall's article, called <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/mac/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229100259">Steve Jobs Should Take A Cue From AIG's Cancer-Stricken CEO</a>: Not everyone agrees that Jobs' medical condition should be a matter of public record. Former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt said he thinks Apple's board is handling the situation correctly. "An intelligent investor should know the risks of Jobs having a relapse," Levitt told Bloomberg BusinessWeek. "For the board to opine on what the extent of the illness is right now I don't think is really necessary." But investment analyst Jason Schwarz, who over the past couple of years has been among the most bullish supporters of Apple and Jobs, said the company's silence is causing confusion among not only investors but also customers, and urged Apple to be more forthcoming about its CEO. Here's an excerpt from Schwarz's recent post on seekingalpha.com called <a href="http://seekingalpha.com/article/250483-adjusting-to-apple-s-new-way-of-doing-things">Adjusting to Apple's New Way of Doing Things</a>: Apple product announcements have turned into prime investment catalysts that determine when Apple stock rises and when Apple stock falls. Needless to say, the Apple calendar has evolved into one of the most important market moving variables that investors track. With Steve Jobs on his medical leave of absence, should we be concerned that Apple doesn’t have its act together? Why didn’t we have a January 27th event? Is the iPad 2 delayed? Is Apple scrambling to come up with a new presentation method? Are they waiting for Steve to get better? These kinds of questions have investors a little uncertain in the short run. It is our opinion that no single person can replace Steve as the public face of the company and we would hope that Apple not even try to imitate the Steve Jobs presentation method. Instead, it would make sense to try something new. Perhaps let a third party production team produce a video short that can be streamed to all Apple stores. Imagine the crowd at your local Apple store for a Tuesday 10:00 am closed circuit broadcast that unveils the latest Apple products. Those stores would be even more packed than they already are. (End of excerpt.) I suspect that these two calls for more openness from Apple will be only the first of many more to come. Because at the intersection of personal privacy, compassion, and investors' right to know lies a complicated reality that even Apple and superstar Steve Jobs will have to address. RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229100252#">Global CIO: Apple iOS Crushes Google Android In Enterprise</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226200113">Global CIO: Global CIO: Top 10 Reasons Steve Jobs & Apple Are The Future Of IT</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227400318">Global CIO: Global CIO: The Awesome Transformative Power Of The Apple iPad</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900335">Global CIO: Global CIO: Apple Storms The Enterprise As iPad And iPhone Surge</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/trends/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000909">Global CIO: Apple Hammers Google Over Tablet Flaws</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000430">Global CIO: The PC Is Dying; Long Live The iPad!</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000087">Global CIO: The Year Of iPad: Apple Booms In Business And In China</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900483">Global CIO: Global CIO: Inside Steve Jobs' Head: The Supremacy Of Software</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900123">Global CIO: Global CIO: The Top 10 Most Influential IT Vendors (Apple And Facebook?)</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900330">Global CIO: Global CIO: Steve Jobs Declares War On Google</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222600158">Global CIO: Global CIO: Apple's Steve Jobs Torpedoes Another Stale Business Model</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228200358">Global CIO: Steve Jobs Creating New-Age Broadcasting Network?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=225900009">Global CIO: Global CIO: Apple CEO Steve Jobs Should Tell Sen. Schumer To Shut Up</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222700839">Global CIO: Global CIO: Why Apple's iPad Will Be A Great Business Device</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500100">Global CIO: Global CIO: Is IBM Or Apple The World's #1 Tech Brand?</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>2011-02-04T08:00:00ZGlobal CIO: Dell Preps iPad Killers As Cloud Business BoomsDell says its enterprise solutions now span from modularized data centers to a forthcoming set of business-ready tablets that will displace Apple's wildly popular iPad.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229201163?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsWhen you think of Dell—a $60 billion company—what comes most immediately to mind? For Dell's liking, I'll bet way too many people would answer notebooks, supply-chain wizardry, built-to-order PCs, and yesteryear's dippy hipster hawking the line, "Dude, you're getting a Dell!" And maybe far too few thought of this: each and every day, about 1 billion work and play in Dell-powered clouds. Recently, the company's gained some notoriety as the x86 provider of choice for powering the stupendous data centers for many of the world's largest web companies, including Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, and some of China's biggest online businesses. But even though that's been a huge achievement for Dell, those megadeals have also partially reinforced the perception of the company as a very large and mightily efficient but not terribly strategic IT player. All of that, however, seems to be about to change dramatically as Dell is looking to reposition itself—and not just cosmetically—as a customer-driven and forward-looking business-technology partner with expertise in virtualization, cloud computing, and "solution stacks" that help CIOs hammer away at the 80/20 spending trap that starves innovation and growth opportunities. At the same time, Dell is also planning to come at the market from the other end of the spectrum with a forthcoming family of tablets aimed squarely at the Apple iPad but designed from conception with enterprise connectivity, management, security, and compliance as indispensable priorities. And Dell believes that new emphasis on flexible and strategic enterprise solutions, in combination with all of the products and capabilities for which it's well known, will give it the blunt-force strength to take on the biggest enterprise IT players without having to sacrifice the agility and speed it has mastered over the years. "Dell is going through classic brand transformation that all IT brands go through," said Andy Lark, VP of marketing Dell's Large Enterprise division, in a phone call this week. "This type of thing doesn't happen quickly and we know it'll take us a while but we're up to it. "At the core, Dell is shifting from being the industry value leader to being the value leader plus the company that can deliver the best solution stack. "For us, that means keeping that stack open, and customers tell us that's one of the things that differentiates us: we're not burdened with loads of legacy business models and legacy engineering requirements and legacy IP that we have to try to drag into the future," Lark said. Taking a shot at primary competitor HP, Lark said this about Dell's perceived advantage:"We're starting from a fresh new position—we don't own a big networking company [hello, HP and 3Com] and we want to keep our stack open. Because of that, we can surprise a lot of customers with the level of flexibility we can bring to an engagement, and we're seeing more of that every day." Before getting Lark's specific thoughts on how this transformation at Dell is taking shape, I wanted to be sure to get his sense of just how Dell defines "open," which is a concept that has been bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated so many ways that, by comparison, it makes the term "cloud computing" seem sharply precise. Asked if the brutally overused term "open" still has any equity—and if so, how does Dell define it—Lark conceded with a laugh that open is "definitely the most abused term in IT marketing. But what I say to customers is that the acid test on whether a vendor's really open or not is for the customer to ask that vendor what they don't have to buy from you." In that context, he said, competitor Cisco is flying in the face of customer preference: "Cisco's approach is that you can have my UCS (Unified Computing System), but you can only have it my way: you can't choose any other hypervisor but Cisco's, or the server form factor you'd prefer, or the type of storage you want—it's all got to be from Cisco, and that's the very definition of a closed, proprietary stack," Lark said. "And the history of our industry says that the closed approach like that fails miserably every time it's tried." So armed with that sense of how not to proceed, how does Dell plan to weave heavy-duty cloud solutions plus enterprise-optimized tablets in with its current blend of products and services to become a strategic IT partner for CIOs for the next decade? "CIOs are telling us they're pursuing IT evolution through virtualization, and they're talking about finding the path to the private cloud through virtualization, so that's where one of our primary focuses is," Lark said. "Their thinking reflects a shift away from repeatedly buying one server for one app, to simply acquiring wide swaths of computer power that can be scaled up or down for a wide range of applications based on need." That has led Dell to develop a spectrum of solutions ranging from cloud server platforms to completely modularized data centers. In a <a href="http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/enterprise/b/it-executive/archive/2011/02/03/moving-the-heart-of-the-efficient-enterprise.aspx">blog post</a> Thursday, Lark cited two new Dell customers whose business required some very untraditional thinking about how to deliver those types of data-center capabilities into challenging physical environments: Carnival Cruise ships and TeamLotus Formula 1 racing company. From Lark's blog post:"But, there was a catch: [TeamLotus] needed to analyze that data on the racetrack. So, we worked with Lotus to develop a mobile data center which can collect and process thousands of megabytes of data from each lap of a race, enabling engineers to make real-time adjustments to the cars either during or after a race. Instead of shipping the hardware to all 19 races they attend worldwide, Team Lotus is now equipped with a consolidated data center, built to withstand extreme weather conditions and geographical terrains, as their new trackside solution." Back in our phone chat and with that type of scenario in mind, Lark described a powerful trend among IT executives in which their thinking uncouples business capability from rigid in-house infrastructure. "I spend 30-40% of my time with customers and this is what we hear from them most consistently: 'I want to deliver IT as a service. I'm less and less interested in infrastructure and more and more on the service delivery so we can focus on how we optimize the workload.' " In Dell's ongoing transformation, he said, that means the company must show it's capable of delivering on that profoundly different set of needs being expressed by CIOs: "Now their concern is the transformation of the entire business and they want not just some fancy notebooks, but rather a fully integrated information environment from cloud to mobile devices and disaster recovery with enterprise-level user management and authentication and so on. "And large corporations don't even ask us about buying notebooks—instead, they ask us, 'Can you provision all these workers for me?' " Which led to the final piece of our conversation: Dell's belief that the iPad's current reign as the coolest enterprise device ever created will be short-lived. "Among our customers, we're seeing the rise of what we call the information consumer—they're very light on the actual processing of data, but very very high on the consumption and analysis of it," Lark said. "We'll soon have a full suite of enterprise tablets specifically designed for these information consumers. The buyer in the enterprise doesn't want an iPad"—I had to stifle a laugh; by its first birthday in April, businesses will probably have purchased about 10 million of them—"but they do want a fully configured and delivered enterprise tablet that's packaged with full support and maintenance, and flexibility in carriers, and highest-level security, and parameters for storage and provisioning and managing the whole experience." I admire Dell's pluckiness in wanting to transcend its solid but limited past, and I admire its vision in charting out a course that will let it leverage its traditional strengths as it expands into higher-value enterprise offerings. And as Lark said, transformations at IT companies with $60 billion in revenue don't happen overnight. But time is not on Dell's side—to achieve the set of ambitious goals outlined above, the company will have to bring to its new future the same hair-on-fire urgency that made it so successful in the PC business that's now becoming a part of its past. RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229100252">Global CIO: Apple iOS Crushes Google Android In Enterprise</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229200135">Global CIO: HP Calls Out Apple In Quest To Be Coolest Of All</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229200297">Global CIO: Sam Palmisano And Larry Ellison Deserve Their Big Paydays</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226200113">Global CIO: Global CIO: Top 10 Reasons Steve Jobs & Apple Are The Future Of IT</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227400318">Global CIO: Global CIO: The Awesome Transformative Power Of The Apple iPad</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900335">Global CIO: Global CIO: Apple Storms The Enterprise As iPad And iPhone Surge</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/trends/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000909">Global CIO: Apple Hammers Google Over Tablet Flaws</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000430">Global CIO: The PC Is Dying; Long Live The iPad!</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000087">Global CIO: The Year Of iPad: Apple Booms In Business And In China</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900483">Global CIO: Global CIO: Inside Steve Jobs' Head: The Supremacy Of Software</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900123">Global CIO: Global CIO: The Top 10 Most Influential IT Vendors (Apple And Facebook?)</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900330">Global CIO: Global CIO: Steve Jobs Declares War On Google</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222600158">Global CIO: Global CIO: Apple's Steve Jobs Torpedoes Another Stale Business Model</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228200358">Global CIO: Steve Jobs Creating New-Age Broadcasting Network?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=225900009">Global CIO: Global CIO: Apple CEO Steve Jobs Should Tell Sen. Schumer To Shut Up</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222700839">Global CIO: Global CIO: Why Apple's iPad Will Be A Great Business Device</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500100">Global CIO: Global CIO: Is IBM Or Apple The World's #1 Tech Brand?</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>2011-02-03T12:04:00ZGlobal CIO: In Google-Microsoft Catfight, Insults Are For LosersThe hissy-fit between the two companies about copying search results means absolutely nothing in the real world of customers who couldn't possibly care less.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229201126?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsIn an NFL playoff game one year ago, the Minnesota Vikings were plastering the Dallas Cowboys 27-3 late in the game yet Minnesota's Brett Favre continued to throw deep passes even though the game appeared out of reach. The Vikings did indeed score another touchdown with only a minute or two left in the game, which caused Cowboys linebacker Keith Brooking to storm over toward the Viking sideline, screaming and waving his fist at the team that was humiliating him and his teammates. And announcer Troy Aikman, a former Cowboy himself, made the following observation: if Keith Brooking doesn't like what the Vikings are doing, and if he didn't want them to score another touchdown, then he and his teammates should have played better defense. "If you don't like what they're doing, then stop them," Aikman said. "That's what you're paid to do." That scenario came to mind as I read about the verbal jousting going on between Google and Microsoft over Google's claim that Microsoft's Bing search engine is copying Google's results. In a post called <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html">Microsoft's Bing uses Google search results—and denies it</a>, Google Fellow Amit Singhal argues that the evidence is indisputable. In his opening paragraph, Singhal frames out the good guys and the bad guys with no mushy gray area in the middle: "By now, you may have read Danny Sullivan's recent post: "Google: Bing is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results" and heard Microsoft's response, "We do not copy Google's results." However you define copying, the bottom line is, these Bing results came directly from Google." Soon thereafter, Microsoft senior VP Yusuf Mehdi responded pointedly in a blog post called <a href="http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2011/02/02/setting-the-record-straight.aspx">Setting the record straight</a> in which he talked about "the level of protest and feigned outrage from Google" and expressed puzzlement over "what brought them to a place where they would level these kinds of accusations." As I see it, so far, so good—each side stating its position clearly and pointing to facts to buttress its case, and may the best product win and all that. But then Microsoft's Mehdi played right into Google's hands by saying this:"We have some of the best minds in the world at work on search quality and relevance, and for a competitor to accuse any one of these people of such activity is just insulting." It may well have been insulting—few of us enjoy being accused of cheating—but the bigger issue is this: so what? How many of the hundreds of millions of search-users out there in the real world give two hoots about either the intricacies of search-engine technology or whether Yusuf Mehdi feels 'insulted' by Google's assertion that Microsoft cheated? Who cares? Do such matters affect the success of your product in the marketplace? As Troy Aikman said of the Cowboys' whining, "If you don't like what they're doing, then stop them." The irony is that most of Mehdi's blog post countering Google's charges was quite strong and resilient because he focused on customers and Microsoft's desire to enhance Bing to create ever-better experiences for those customers. For example: "Bing was launched nearly two years ago to break new ground and help move the search industry in new directions," Mehdi wrote. "We have brought a number of things to market that we are very proud of—our daily home page photos, infinite scroll in image search, great travel and shopping experiences, a new and more useful visual approach to search, and partnerships with key leaders like Facebook and Twitter. If you are keeping tabs, you will notice Google has "copied" a few of these. Whether they have done it well we leave to customers. But more importantly, we take no issue and are glad we could help move the industry to adopt some good ideas." In the headline atop this column, I wrote that "insults are for losers." By that, I mean that if Google is fabricating these charges against Microsoft because Google sees Bing grabbing market share and threatening to overtake Google in the hearts and minds of customers, then such a ploy will surely turn out to be useless and would only underscore the fact that the search world will soon have a new leader. Conversely, as the challenger in the market, Microsoft needs to understand that customers are interested in only one thing from Bing: superb experiences. They're not interested in inside-the-industry pissing contests, they're not interested in hearing about hurt feelings, and they're not interested in the intramural challenges that take place in high-stakes global competition. They're interested in great experiences, and onlygreat experiences. To further quote Mehdi, "Period. Full stop." If Mehdi and Microsoft don't like Google's tactics, then it's their job to beat Google in the marketplace. It's their job to deliver superior products and services and experiences. It's their job to dazzle customers by, as Mehdi said, bringing new ideas to market and moving the industry forward. If you don't like what they're doing, then stop them. RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229200297">Global CIO: Sam Palmisano And Larry Ellison Deserve Their Big Paydays</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229100408">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Will Need A Time Machine To Catch Us, Says IBM</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228900228">Global CIO: Larry Ellison's 10-Point Plan For World Domination</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229001011">Global CIO: IBM Zings Oracle And HP Over Lack Of Vision</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226500193">Global CIO: Larry Ellison And The New Oracle Rock The Tech World</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500100">Global CIO: Is IBM Or Apple The World's #1 Tech Brand?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222500081">Global CIO: Larry Ellison's Top 10 Reasons For Buying Sun</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/reviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000909">Global CIO: Apple Hammers Google Over Tablet Flaws</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000783">Global CIO: HP's New Strategy Will Intensify Battles With IBM And Oracle</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000361">Global CIO: The Top 10 CIO Issues For 2011</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900330">Global CIO: Steve Jobs Declares War On Google</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900335">Global CIO: Apple Storms The Enterprise As iPad And iPhone Surge</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000430">Global CIO: The PC Is Dying; Long Live The iPad!</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000087">Global CIO: The Year Of iPad: Apple Booms In Business And In China</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900483">Global CIO: Inside Steve Jobs' Head: The Supremacy Of Software</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900123">Global CIO: The Top 10 Most Influential IT Vendors (Apple And Facebook?)</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227400318">Global CIO: The Awesome Transformative Power Of The Apple iPad</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224400178">Global CIO: Google CEO Eric Schmidt's Top 10 Reasons Mobile Is #1</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227200199">Global CIO: IBM's Blazing New MainframeWins Raves From Citigroup</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=225600194">Global CIO: 10 Reasons CIOs Will Get Fired This Year</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>2011-02-03T07:42:00ZGlobal CIO: Sam Palmisano And Larry Ellison Deserve Their Big PaydaysThe anti-capitalism community will howl, but the CEOs of IBM and Oracle deserve every penny of their big comp deals. Sorry, howlers, but the numbers tell the story.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229200297?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsAs corporations close their books on 2010 and begin releasing information on executive pay, you can bet that the various constituents making up the Indignance And Outrage Lobby will soon be wringing their hands, wailing lamentations, and petitioning Congress over CEO compensation and the yawning gap betwixt it and what we mere mortals make. In what would be my perfect world, each of those whiners would be free to screech to his/her heart's content about this phony-baloney injustice but each would first have to go stick his/her head in a bucket (or in any other cozy compartment) so that the rest of us wouldn't have to hear it. Because the very same capitalist system that has given this country the best standard of living in the world and the most opportunity for its citizens also gives private enterprises the right to compensate their CEOs as lavishly or as appropriately as they may choose. And in almost every case, the free market gets it right. Sure, there are exceptions, and some corporate scoundrels bend the rules or are in cahoots with their boards to ensure that compensation remains disconnected from performance and shareholder value. But such examples are rare—that's why they get so much publicity when the scoundrels are finally flushed out and face the disgrace they deserve. Far more common are companies like IBM and Oracle, whose appropriately highly paid CEOs (Sam Palmisano and Larry Ellison) generate the vast majority of their compensation from performance-based incentives tied to the overall fortunes of their companies earnings and stock prices. IBM has just disclosed some details relating to CEO Sam Palmisano's incentive compensation, so let's take a look at that. From a recent news story out of North Carolina's newsobserver.com: " IBM <a href="http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/01/29/952445/incentives-rise-89-for-ibms-ceo.html">nearly doubled the incentive pay</a> for CEO Samuel Palmisano in 2010, the technology company reported in a regulatory filing Friday. "Bloomberg News reported that Palmisano, who has led the company for eight years, received $9 million in incentives compared to $4.75 million the prior year. His full compensation package will be reported later. "IBM reported profit for the year of $11.52 a share, which beat the company's target. IBM is one of this region's largest private employers, with about 10,000 workers at its Research Triangle Park campus." (End of excerpt.) Yes indeed, the company's profit surely did "beat the company's target"—it did so by a wide margin. In fact, I found it odd that this same article that was so eager to point out that Palmisano's incentive compensation almost doubled from the previous year chose to devote only five words in trying to describe the rationale for that big boost: "which beat the company's target." For a much richer look at what Palmisano and IBM achieved in 2010, here are some details from a recent news story by my InformationWeek colleague Paul McDougall, reporting on IBM's plan to grant $1,000 in stock incentives to all non-executive employees in return for the company's great year. From <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/unix_linux/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229100037">McDougall's article</a>:** "IBM earlier this week said revenues for the fourth quarter of 2010 increased 7%, to $29 billion, while net income grew 9%, to $5.3 billion—both quarterly records for the company." ** " 'We completed an outstanding year, with record profit and free cash flow, and exceeded the high end of our 2010 earnings per share roadmap objective,' said Palmisano, in a statement." ** " 'We also capped a decade in which our shift to high-value businesses, our global integration of IBM, our investment in research and development of almost $60 billion and our acquisition of 116 companies have helped us to nearly triple our EPS and return more than $100 billion to shareholders,' said Palmisano, whose total compensation package was worth $21.2 million in 2009, the most recent year for which IBM has published data on executive pay." ** "IBM's push into new markets, along with aggressive cost controls, have powered the company's stock price to new heights over a period when most investors were happy just not to lose money. IBM's share price has almost doubled over the past five years, while an S&P tracking fund would have returned 0% over the same period." With results like that for IBM shareholders and for IBM customers, did Palmisano deserve an additional $4.25 million in incentive pay? If you ask me, for the scope of Palmisano's achievement affecting 400,000 IBM employees, many tens of thousands of shareholders, and many thousands of IBM customers who proved their belief in him with their wallets, that $4.25 million bump in incentive pay was a great bargain for IBM. As IBM discloses more details of Palmisano's overall comp package, surely we'll hear cries of outrage from various quarters about the unfairness and even cruelty of one person getting $9 million in incentives and probably another $10 million or so in stock options, while hundreds of thousands of Palmisano's grassroots IBM colleagues only get $1,000 in stock options that don't vest until 2015. Maybe that will lead to proposed legislation from Congress saying such disparities can't exceed 400x, or 100x, or 10x. But if we're going to head down that suicidal slope, then why not be true to the core ideal and attempt to mandate zero disparity in pay for all employees? If lots and lots of people could do what Sam Palmisano has done at IBM for almost the past decade,then the fundamental laws of supply and demand would greatly reduce the compensation IBM's willing to pay its CEO. That's clearly not the case, and free-market dynamics result in Palmisano receiving significant compensation for very significant performance. Then there's Oracle, where CEO Larry Ellison takes a salary of only $1 per year and ties the vast majority of his compensation to the company's stock price. Here's a perspective on Ellison's value to the company from a recent investorplace.com article called <a href="http://www.investorplace.com/27701/ceo-salary-apple-jobs-oracle-ellison/">5 Elite CEOs Getting Paid Peanuts</a>: Ellison "commands only $1 a year to lead the database giant. . . . Oracle shareholders also have some big bucks to spend as well, as the stock sailed 29% higher in 2010." And since the beginning of 2011, the stock's continued to climb. But since one year offers only a relatively limited timespan for evaluating performance, let's look back over the last decade to gauge Oracle's performance against Ellison's compensation. Without question, for the decade ending May 31, 2009, Ellison was paid spectacularly well, as detailed in a Wall Street Journal analysis of public-company CEO pay over the past decade that put him in the #1 spot with this whopping pay package:Total compensation of $1.84 billion over those 10 years. <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703724104575379680484726298.html">The Journal specified</a> that almost all of those earnings (97%) came from realized gains on stock options—that is, the overwhelming majority of Ellison's pay for the decade was tied very specifically to the success of the company he founded and in which he holds about a 23% ownership stake. Isn't that the ideal model: having top executives with not just some skin in the game but massive chunks of it? Meanwhile, the Journal's analysis also says that in that 10-year period, Oracle did a great job for shareholders as its market cap almost tripled, from $36 billion to $98 billion. On top of that, in the 20 months since the end of the 10-year period tracked by the Journal, Oracle stockholders have seen their holdings soar another 70% as Oracle's market cap as of Wednesday afternoon was $168 billion. Unfortunately, facts don't carry much weight with crusaders looking to undercut the capitalist system by attempting to demonize high-achieving and high-earning executives, so have your earplugs close at hand as the Indignance And Outrage Lobby gets set to swing into action. RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229100408">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Will Need A Time Machine To Catch Us, Says IBM</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228900228">Global CIO: Larry Ellison's 10-Point Plan For World Domination</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229001011">Global CIO: IBM Zings Oracle And HP Over Lack Of Vision</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226500193">Global CIO: Larry Ellison And The New Oracle Rock The Tech World</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500100">Global CIO: Is IBM Or Apple The World's #1 Tech Brand?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222500081">Global CIO: Larry Ellison's Top 10 Reasons For Buying Sun</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/reviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000909">Global CIO: Apple Hammers Google Over Tablet Flaws</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000783">Global CIO: HP's New Strategy Will Intensify Battles With IBM And Oracle</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000361">Global CIO: The Top 10 CIO Issues For 2011</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900330">Global CIO: Steve Jobs Declares War On Google</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900335">Global CIO: Apple Storms The Enterprise As iPad And iPhone Surge</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000430">Global CIO: The PC Is Dying; Long Live The iPad!</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000087">Global CIO: The Year Of iPad: Apple Booms In Business And In China</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900483">Global CIO: Inside Steve Jobs' Head: The Supremacy Of Software</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900123">Global CIO: The Top 10 Most Influential IT Vendors (Apple And Facebook?)</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227400318">Global CIO: The Awesome Transformative Power Of The Apple iPad</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224400178">Global CIO: Google CEO Eric Schmidt's Top 10 Reasons Mobile Is #1</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227200199">Global CIO: IBM's Blazing New MainframeWins Raves From Citigroup</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=225600194">Global CIO: 10 Reasons CIOs Will Get Fired This Year</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>2011-02-02T08:00:00ZGlobal CIO: $100-Billion Tesco Kicks CIO Upstairs To CEO As the $100-billion retailer accelerates its use of IT as a strategic weapon in its global expansion, Tesco CIO Philip Clarke will take the reins as CEO on March 1.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229200227?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsWhile it's accurate to call Tesco a retailer, that term simply doesn't do justice to the far-flung achievements and aspirations of the $100-billion British company. Tesco does indeed operate retail stores—more than 5,000 in 14 countries around the globe—but it also offers banking, insurance, travel services, online shopping, mobile phone services, weight-loss consulting, vision care, mobile applications, and more. To optimize all of those opportunities, and to manage simultaneously its consistent growth not just in its U.K. home base but in China and its other emerging markets, Tesco knows that technology is an indispensable strategic asset in everything from leveraging grocery-shopping affinity accounts with mobile-phone merchandising to overseeing global supply chains to making each of Tesco's many millions of customers feel that the company is willing to reconfigure itself to suit his or her needs. And to ensure the company has the right blend of leadership and vision to exploit all of those opportunities and to uncover new ones, Tesco is elevating its current CIO and head of international business, Philip Clarke, to chief executive effective March 1. While that type of CIO ascendancy is unusual—especially at a company of Tesco's size—we seem to be reaching a point where the responsibilities that business-centric CIOs are seeking and receiving will make more and more of them fully legitimate candidates for CEO positions. As I wrote last month in <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000361">Global CIO: The Top 10 CIO Issues For 2011</a>, CIOs can no longer operate as second-class C-level leaders whose fancy title outflanks their actual immersion in their companies' strategic direction, revenue growth, customer engagements, and market opportunities. "Like the cranks who frothily peddled the notion that vaccinations trigger autism, too many uninformed tech-strategy charlatans are still pushing the ancient and empty bromide that CIOs need to 'request a seat at the table,' " I wrote in describing the fully evolved role of the CIO. "That load of crap will be buried once and for all in 2011 because CIOs who haven't earned that C-suite credibility and autonomy by virtue of their visions and their achievements will be long gone by the time winter turns to spring for the simple reason that businesses without aggressive tech capabilities won't be able to compete in the coming decade. "No matter how slick their marketing or how rosy their past, and no matter how big their market share or how high their CEO's profile, those IT-stunted companies will be pulverized in the coming year by a lethal combination of faster/smarter/better competitors and uninspired and disengaged customers. "2011 is the year in which the CIO profession—once and for all, permanently and without any do-overs—casts off all of the residual crutches that have for so long often rendered CIOs last among C-level equals. Among the all-time stinkers in that smelly pile are ones like 'we're a support organization' or 'the business just doesn't understand IT' or 'we can run what we have, or we can innovate, but we can't do both.' " (End of excerpt.) For Tesco's Clarke, the journey to the top of a global retail powerhouse with almost half a million employees began 36 years as a stockboy in a Tesco store managed by his father, <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/8152391/Philip-Clarke-the-new-man-behind-Tesco.html">according to a news article</a> in the U.K.'s Telegraph.com. Here's an insightful excerpt from that piece:After graduating with an economics degree from Liverpool university, he joined Tesco's management trainee scheme in 1981. Roles as a store manager, product buyer and marketeer followed. He joined the Tesco board in 1998 and has worked closely alongside [outgoing CEO Sir Terry Leahy] as the group has expanded overseas, taking on the likes of Wal-Mart and Carrefour. That international experience, say sources, was key to him winning the job. Tesco's growth in the coming years will likely be driven by the success of its international operations. (End of excerpt.) That's certainly true, but Clarke's outlook also underscores that he'll be leaning on his experiences in orchestrating a massive set of global applications and processes as Tesco continues to expand into new geographic markets with new offerings for consumers. "The delicatessen counter in China has to be different from the delicatessen counter in Korea, but behind the scenes we have tried to make sure that our business processes, our systems, our structures—everything is laid out for countries," Clarke is quoted as saying in the Telegraph.com piece. Clarke led Tesco's expansion into India and South Korea, the article said, and among his priorities is ensuring that Tesco has not only the systems required to operate on such a scale, but also the collaborative culture that will allow it to move as fast as its customers in pursuing ideas and opportunities. And to do that, Clarke told the Telegraph, he'll need to spend significant time away from corporate headquarters and be immersed in the marketplace with customers, suppliers, stores, and employees—all of which sounds like perfect advice for today's CIOs, whether or not they aspire to be a CEO. "I'm not going to run Tesco from Cheshunt," he said. "What I love to do is walk the stores, meet the staff and listen to the customers, because it all happens there. As chief executive my job is to be sure that we are meeting the needs of customers and that we are looking after our staff." Replacing Clarke as CIO will be the company's current IT director, Mike McNamara, who as CIO will report to Clarke, <a href="http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/1940041/tesco-promotes-director-cio">according to a news story</a> on the computing.co.uk website. Earlier in his Tesco career, McNamara had been the CTO of the retailer's online business. RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229200135">Global CIO: HP Calls Out Apple In CEO's Quest To Be Coolest Of All</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228702008">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Vows To 'Go After' HP; Is Alliance Dead?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229001011">Global CIO: IBM Zings Oracle And HP Over Limited Vision</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000285">Global CIO: Silicon Valley Crackup: Oracle & HP Killing 25-Year Alliance?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000783">Global CIO: HP's New Strategy Will Intensify Battles With IBM And Oracle</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000361">Global CIO: The Top 10 CIO Issues For 2011</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227701035">Global CIO: Are HP And SAP Perfect Match Or Train Wreck?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227400105">Global CIO: Gunning For IBM And Oracle, HP Plans Optimized-Systems Blitz</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000430">Global CIO: The PC Is Dying: Long Live The iPad!</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500510">Global CIO: Larry Ellison And IBM Lead Surge In Optimized Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228800683">Global CIO: An Open Letter To IBM CEO Sam Palmisano</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900335">Global CIO: Apple Storms The Enterprise As iPad And iPhone Surge</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900330">Global CIO: Steve Jobs Declares War On Google</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228800222">Global CIO: Apple, IBM, Or Microsoft: Who Has #1 Most-Valuable Software Product?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228300210">Global CIO: The Rise Of Analytics Triggers The Fall Of The Tactical CIO</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228201021">Global CIO: IBM Leads IT Industry With Surge In Analytics And Hardware</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228900228">Global CIO: Larry Ellison's 10-Point Plan For World Domination</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228300007">Global CIO: SAP's Striking Turnaround Triggered By Customer-Centric Strategy</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228701955">Global CIO: Top 10 Tech Stories Of The Year: The Complete List</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228200126">Global CIO: HP CEO Leo Apotheker's Agenda: What Will He Do First?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900123">Global CIO: The Top 10 Most-Influential IT Vendors</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500422">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Swaps Cloud Rants For Cloud Love With Exalogic</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>2011-02-01T08:00:00ZGlobal CIO: HP Calls Out Apple In CEO's Quest To Be Coolest Of AllNew CEO Leo Apotheker finally talks about HP's future but says nothing about the enterprise. Instead, he says HP will out-cool Apple. Word up. http://www.informationweek.com/news/229200135?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsOn the one hand, you've got to admire HP CEO Leo Apotheker's brashness in calling out Apple, a company whose market cap is more than three times that of HP, whose revenue is rapidly approximating that of HP, whose brand recognition and image are far stronger than those of HP, and whose "coolness" factor is light years beyond that of HP. But if vision without execution is hallucination (thank you, Thomas Edison), then brashness without strategic clarity is silliness. Heck, it's terrific for Apotheker to aspire for HP to burnish its image as a front-edge innovator of marvelous new devices and whiz-bang gadgetry, but is that what HP's customers and prospects and partners want and need to hear about at this time from HP's relatively new and so-far uncommunicative CEO? We can imagine, at least in part, how this all came about. Apotheker, who not only presides over the world's largest IT company but also likes to present himself as a multilingual man of the world, chose to do an interview last week with the BBC in the midst of the rarified air of the World Economic Forum in Davos. In such a setting, Apotheker might well have decided he had nothing to lose by speaking with wild abandon about his aspirations for HP. After all, this wasn't some gritty tech-industry event where he'd be expected to discuss networking and servers and predictive analytics—this was Davos, and the BBC, and a platform from which HP's new CEO could seek to transcend the muck of business technology and instead appeal to the elusive appetites and whimsy of the congnoscenti. That is why, I think, he chose not to speak about the very real and very serious competitive challenges HP faces from a resurgent IBM and a high-flying Oracle, both of which have HP very directly in their crosshairs (that's just a metaphor, folks): he wanted to share a broad vision of where he thinks HP should be. And that is why I also think he made a serious blunder. Here's the comment that I think will come back to haunt Apotheker, via this <a href="http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=28729">excerpt from a news story</a> on hexus.net:<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12291529">Talking to the BBC</a> following the World Economic Forum, Mr Apotheker reflected on what he thinks the company needs to do to transform its image from a boring printer and PC manufacturer to one that can wow a generation raised on Apple's iDevices. "What's happening is probably the biggest revolution in the history of IT," he told the Beeb. "The internet is going totally mobile, the bandwidth is there...so many technologies are converging, and HP is the one company that can put it all together. We want to be the leader in this." "I hope one day people will say 'this is as cool as HP'," he added, "not 'as cool as Apple' ". (End of excerpt.) I've always loved the <a href="http://thinkexist.com/quotation/ah-but_a_man-s_reach_should_exceed_his_grasp-or/150975.html">ambition embodied in Robert Browning's line</a>, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" But the problem with this blatant grasp-exceeding gambit by Apotheker is that it's the very first substantive point he's made publicly about the direction in which he wants to take the company. What about HP's Converged Infrastructure strategy? Not a peep. Or HP's booming networking business? Silence. How about IBM's contention that HP's lost its way in enterprise systems due to sustained lack of investment? Not a word. Or Larry Ellison's repeated and very public contentions that at the increasingly important high end of the systems market, HP's offerings are slow, expensive, and brittle, and that Oracle's going to go aggressively after HP's customers? Nothing. (For extensive analysis of those challenges from IBM and Oracle as well as other related perspectives, be sure to check out our "Recommended Reading" list at the end of this column.) For six months, HP's terrific people, in the absence of CEO-level articulation of who the company is and where it is going, have done a standup job of delivering strong financial results and continuing to represent the company proudly and effectively. But after two months with no CEO and four months of almost total silence from Apotheker, I would think HP's 300,000 employees and its similar number of business customers around the world want to hear at least a broad sense of Apotheker's vision for the company's enterprise business on questions like these: **With the HP-Oracle alliance falling apart, what is HP doing to fill the gaps left by the soon-to-be-gone Oracle software? **What's HP's short-term cloud strategy and its long-term cloud strategy? **What's HP's enterprise mobility strategy? **Apotheker told the BBC that he feels HP stock is undervalued. Why does he think that? **Growth rates for PCs, where HP is massively invested, are under attack from smartphones and tablets, where HP has next to no presence. What does Apotheker plan to do about making HP a viable player in enterprise mobility? Well. Apotheker might not like those questions, and he might not like the fact that his business customers and prospects and partners are all wondering about what the future holds in those and other critical areas, but he has chosen during his four-month tenure as CEO to say nothing about any of those topics. And now that he has made some public comments, what's the subject? His desire to out-cool Apple. The business world does not have a clear sense of HP's intentions, and has not had one for the past few months. In the meantime, every competitor from IBM to Oracle to Dell to Cisco to EMC and others has been using that uncertainty, that vacuum, to hammer away at HP's enterprise customer base. But now, HP's sales team can tell all those CIOs not to worry about all their questions about HP's plan for the cloud and virtualization and data-center and mobility stuff—after all, the HP salespeople can tell those CIOs that in several years, HP's gonna be cooler than Apple. Hey—the boss says so. RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228702008">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Vows To 'Go After' HP; Is Alliance Dead?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229001011">Global CIO: IBM Zings Oracle And HP Over Limited Vision</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000285">Global CIO: Silicon Valley Crackup: Oracle & HP Killing 25-Year Alliance?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000783">Global CIO: HP's New Strategy Will Intensify Battles With IBM And Oracle</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000361">Global CIO: The Top 10 CIO Issues For 2011</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227701035">Global CIO: Are HP And SAP Perfect Match Or Train Wreck?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227400105">Global CIO: Gunning For IBM And Oracle, HP Plans Optimized-Systems Blitz</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000430">Global CIO: The PC Is Dying: Long Live The iPad!</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500510">Global CIO: Larry Ellison And IBM Lead Surge In Optimized Systems</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228800683">Global CIO: An Open Letter To IBM CEO Sam Palmisano</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900335">Global CIO: Apple Storms The Enterprise As iPad And iPhone Surge</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900330">Global CIO: Steve Jobs Declares War On Google</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228800222">Global CIO: Apple, IBM, Or Microsoft: Who Has #1 Most-Valuable Software Product?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228300210">Global CIO: The Rise Of Analytics Triggers The Fall Of The Tactical CIO</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228201021">Global CIO: IBM Leads IT Industry With Surge In Analytics And Hardware</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228900228">Global CIO: Larry Ellison's 10-Point Plan For World Domination</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228300007">Global CIO: SAP's Striking Turnaround Triggered By Customer-Centric Strategy</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228701955">Global CIO: Top 10 Tech Stories Of The Year: The Complete List</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228200126">Global CIO: HP CEO Leo Apotheker's Agenda: What Will He Do First?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900123">Global CIO: The Top 10 Most-Influential IT Vendors</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500422">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Swaps Cloud Rants For Cloud Love With Exalogic</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>2011-01-31T08:00:00ZGlobal CIO: The Software Revolution: Can SAP Light The Fuse?Three emerging technologies have sparked a new generation of incredibly fast enterprise apps with huge disruptive potential—and SAP plans to lead this revolution.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229200069?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors"Back in India, where I grew up, my dad was an officer in the Indian railway system, and he used to take me inside the locomotives to see how they worked: there was the fireman, sweating and pitch-dark from the coal and dust and noise, shoveling coal into the fire as fast as he could, and it was really almost painful to see. And next to him was the engineer, and he's trying to watch hundreds of dials and knobs and levers all at the same time to try to keep the train going 40 kilometers per hour. "And a few years ago, my dad came to visit me in Germany and we took the ICE train from Cologne and that train had a top speed of 300 kilometers per hour. And I had arranged to be able to take my dad up front to see the driver, and we enter the front compartment and there the driver sat, smoking a cigarette and calmly talking to another driver without even looking at the instrument panel! And my dad said, 'My God—can you believe this!' "But that mirrors the type of truly astonishing transformations we are beginning to see in the software industry—and within a very short time, we'll see not just one but thousands of advances of that same magnitude that my dad saw on that high-speed train in Germany." With that deeply personal and profound analogy, SAP's Vishal Sikka, the company's executive board member overseeing technology and innovation, framed his perspective on how the important but relatively stodgy world of enterprise software is on the threshhold of a far-reaching transformation that will produce software solutions that run far faster and with more power than anything we've been able to imagine until now. Based on SAP's experiences with 50 global customers that have been using its new in-memory-technology analytics appliance called Hana, Sikka said, SAP believes it can and should create totally new versions of its applications that incorporate Hana's underlying in-memory technology to accelerate performance by factors of tens, hundreds, or even thousands. In a phone conversation late last week, Sikka said this new generation of applications would be not only faster but also simpler to write because of fewer moving parts, and also able to leverage opportunities in social and mobile expectations that are becoming ubiquitous in both the consumer and business worlds. "With this technology, we have the ability to process data at unbelievable speeds, and so we chose as our first application real-time analytics with Hana," Sikka said. "But perhaps even more important, we see the opportunity to completely rethink all of our applications on top of this new technology, and that means a lot of the applications that currently do the processing of that data become so much faster—and I mean thousands of times faster in Hana—which gives us the opportunity to completely refactor the apps themselves. As an example, Sikka cited SAP's own internal use of a dunning application with its CRM system to remind customers that bills are due. The Hana appliance, he said, runs that SAP internal application 1,200 times faster than on standard hardware. "In addition to the unbelievable speed of the application, you can now add new designs and user experiences that are now possible for taking full advantage of the mobile devices and social connections and networks people now have today," Sikka said. "And this is very profound, for this reason":"This combination is what I can the 'new reality' in which we are now able to completely rethink applications to make them dramatically faster and dramatically simpler—since all of that application functionality that used to be done outside of the application in the database is no longer needed, the code that's required is smaller, simpler, and easier to manage," Sikka said. "And so we will deliver a whole new family of dynamic applications—Strategic Workforce Planning was the first—and in addition, every single product within SAP will be transformed as well. Strategic Workforce Planning is available now, there will be another new set of transformed products rolled out this quarter, then many more later this year, and over time all of our products will be available with these new capabilities." Sikka then offered a couple of tangible examples from among the 50 customers who've been "co-innovating" with SAP on Hana over the past several months. Deutsche Bank said it wanted to accelerate the data-crunching time needed to determine the best candidates for cross-selling opportunities, and the bank's top IT executive said Hana has provided superb results: "Deutsche Bank has run a prototype with an early version of the in-memory technology," said Hermann-Josef Lamberti, Group COO and head of group technology and operations, in a statement given to SAP for use in a forthcoming book by company founder and chairman Hasso Plattner. "In particular," Lamberti said, "we were able to speed up the data-analysis process to detect cross-selling opportunities in our customer database from previously 45 minutes to 5 seconds. In-memory is a powerful new dimension of applied compute power." Let me just do a little arithmetic on that: from 2,700 seconds to 5 seconds: an improvement of 540x. Sikka offered another example: "Just this morning, we got the results from one of our customers in healthcare, and they had given us 460 million records of clinical data on which they were running trials. They were able to reduce response time from 47 minutes to 5 seconds running on a 32-core machine on Hana," he said. "I don't know how else to say it except that the results from customers are unbelievable." Sikka then recounted a Hana case study that he's mentioned in the past, but he added one very significant new detail: the cost of the old hardware versus the new hardware. "We have a large CPG customer with 460 billion records, and in the past we've mentioned that Hana was able to deliver response-time improvements of 20x and more. What we haven't mentioned is that while the hardware we used to achieve that had a cost of about $530,000, the previous hardware this customer had been using to get the old, slow results before Hana had a list price of over $15,000,000." And the hardware prices for Hana systems are declining, Sikka said, noting that the $530,000 machine cited above—10 blades, 32 cores each—could be purchased today for $405,000 due to declining prices in some key components. Plus, he said, a 64-core machine would today have a price of just over $600,000—and, 80-core machines should be available in just a few months. "Here's why this is so important for our customers: as Edison said, 'vision without execution is hallucination.' Well, we're not hallucinating. The need for speed today is so profound, that if you can take some process that used to take hours or even many minutes and turn that into seconds or subseconds, then the entire behavior and mindset of people changes as well," Sikka said. "It's like with Google Instant: as you're typing your query in and you're not even finished, it starts to give you results or at least suggestions, and that type of speed and insight leads to changes in behavior," Sikka said. "When you expose these apps on mobile devices at unbelievable speeds, people can make not just faster but better decisions than ever before. And from that we see that the nature of business is changing, and boardroom discussions are changing as they're rooted more about what's possible and what we can anticipate." One final point: if you'd like to get a deeper sense of the technology dynamics involved with SAP's in-memory technology and its Hana analytics appliance, please be sure to check out my colleague Doug Henschen's superb piece from December called <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/enterprise_apps/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228500082">SAP Delivers Promised Analytic Appliance</a>. And for much more on SAP and its strategies and competitive challenges, please see our list below of related analyses. RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229100327">Global CIO: SAP Transformed: From Stuffy ERP To Real-Time iPad Analytics</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227700179">Global CIO: SAP's Sweeping Turnaround: Exclusive Co-CEO Interview</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226400038">Global CIO: The CEO Of The Year Is SAP's Bill McDermott</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222700640">Global CIO: An Open Letter To SAP Chairman Hasso Plattner</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000630">Global CIO: Inside SAP: 2,500 iPads Are Only The Beginning <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900435">Global CIO: Top 10 Most Influential IT Vendors, Part 2 (Microsoft And HP?)</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224900265">Global CIO: How SAP Is Leading The Mobile-Enterprise Revolution</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226800416">Global CIO: SAP Confronts The Real-Time Culture Wars</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228300007">Global CIO: SAP's Striking Turnaround Triggered By Customer-Centric Strategy</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222700417">Global CIO: SAP's Last Chance: It's The Customers, Stupid!</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224200552">Global CIO: Larry Ellison Declares War On IBM And SAP</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224700078">Global CIO: SAP's McDermott Slaps Back At Oracle And Refocuses On Customers</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224700286">Global CIO: Inside SAP: 10 Factors Behind Its Dramatic Turnaround</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224800105">Global CIO: SAP's Top 10 Priorities To Become Undisputed #1</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228000429">Global CIO: SAP: The Top 10 Reasons We'll Beat Oracle In Applications</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224700913">Global CIO: SAP's Hasso Plattner On Databases And Larry Ellison</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223900147">Global CIO: 10 Things SAP's Co-CEOs Should Focus On</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227600036">Global CIO: An Open Letter To HP CEO Leo Apotheker</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227200094">Global CIO: SAP Stunner: ERP Deal Boosts Customer Profit $100M Per Year</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227701035">Global CIO: Are HP And SAP Perfect Match Or Train Wreck?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224200862">Global CIO: Larry Ellison's Nightmare: 10 Ways SAP Can Beat Oracle</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227501133">Global CIO: HP CEO Apotheker Has Deep Expertise But Checkered History</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=220301602">Global CIO: SAP Promises Business Value Over Products: Can It Deliver?</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>2011-01-28T08:00:00ZGlobal CIO: Larry Ellison Will Need A Time Machine To Catch Us, Says IBMEllison's vowed to remake Oracle in the fashion of circa-1960 IBM: a true systems company. But IBM says it's impossible for Ellison to overcome that 50-year head start.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229100408?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsAs a new wave of extremely high-performance systems hits the market in 2011, CIOs will have the luxury of harnessing or tapping into massive new levels of highly intelligent computing power for everything from OLTP to data warehousing to advanced analytics. And while many IT vendors are helping to drive those unprecedented performance levels—chief among them SAP, whose advances we'll analyze on Monday—two companies that have expressed the most naked ambition about offering the most-powerful systems on the planet are IBM and Oracle. They're not speaking about this in vague generalities, or issuing any aw-shucks euphemisms for how they're just happy to be here. Quite the contrary: both IBM and Oracle are singling each other out as primary competitors in the battle to become the unquestioned leader in developing the high-end systems that customers are demanding for crunching through larger and more-complex workloads than businesses have ever tried to manage before, and at speeds that just a few years ago would have been considered impossible. So who's going to win this high-performance race? Larry Ellison says all he wants is a chance—just a fair chance—to fulfill the promise created by IBM CEO T.J. Watson Jr. 50 years ago and that Ellison says IBM has failed since then to pursue. But IBM says that while it's all fine and dandy for Ellison and others to covet the top spot in systems IBM currently holds, time is very clearly on IBM's side as its 50 years of relentless investments in software engineering and chip technology and systems engineering and integration and materials science and storage technology and networking and more have combined to give it a lead over its rivals that IBM feels will be just about impossible to close. For CIOs, it's important to see this intense competition in the proper perspective, which is not just some testosterone-driven chest-beating. Instead, what Oracle and IBM are engaged in is a very fundamental transformation of the value proposition and structure of the IT-industry business model away from the DIY model where customers buy tons of components and then spend many months putting them together, and toward a near-term future where huge and rapidly reconstituting IT powerhouses do the engineering, assembly, tuning, integration, and optimizations for the customer. And they're driving toward being the leaders of a cohesive world of business-driven systems rather than a fragmented world of wonderful but disconnected stuff. Ellison believes that his acquisition of Sun and his reinvention of Oracle from software-only to "software and hardware engineered together", along with massive investments in all that combined technology, will give him and his company a chance to unseat IBM as the #1 maker of high-end systems. IBM says fuhgeddaboudit: decades of hard-earned discovery and insight and exploration and achievement can't be matched in just a couple of years, no matter how eager or committed the pursuer. Take a look, from about 16 months ago, at Ellison's first comments on his desire to turn Oracle into the type of company that he feels IBM could have been:"We want to be TJ Watson Jr.'s IBM," Ellison said at the time during a public appearance in the Bay Area. "Not Lou Gerstner's IBM, not Palmisano's IBM—we wanna be T.J. Watson Jr.'s IBM. And that's when IBM really was the dominant software company—uh, 'dominates' is a bad word (audience laughter)—they're not allowed to use that word—well, but they were the dominant software company in the world and they translated that position in software to become the dominant systems company in the world. We are not going into the hardware business. We have no interest (shrugs) in the hardware business. We have a deep interest in the systems business. . . . "T.J. Watson Jr.'s IBM was the greatest company in the history of the enterprise on Earth because they had that combination of hardware and software running most of the enterprises on the planet. That company was the dominant company in computing when I came into this industry: it was pre-Intel, there was no Intel, there was no PC, there certainly was no Mac or any of this stuff. It was IBM, IBM, IBM. And I was told that IBM was not a company against which you competed; IBM was the environment in which you competed. We've already beaten IBM in software—on modern systems. And now, if everyone will let us, we'd like to see if we can beat IBM in hardware, or systems." (For the full story on this, please see <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222500081">Global CIO: Larry Ellison's Top 10 Reasons For Buying Sun</a>.) Now flash forward to just one month ago when Ellison used Oracle's latest earnings call to frame out his vision of just how close he feels his company has come to pulling into a tie with IBM in high-end systems: "We expect overall that our new generation of Sun machines—Exadata, Exalogic, and Sparc Superclusters—will enable us to win significant share in the high-end server market and put us into the #2 position behind IBM very, very soon," Ellison said. "Then we'll fight it out with IBM for the #1 spot." (For deeper analysis on how Ellison plans to do win that fight, please see <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228900228">Global CIO: Larry Ellison's 10-Point Plan For World Domination</a>.) But Ellison's powerful ambition, counters IBM, is out of line with reality. During IBM's earnings call last week, CFO Mark Loughridge was asked about his company's stance in this increasingly popular market for high-performance integrated systems, and while Loughridge did not mention Oracle and Ellison by name, he clearly was referring to them and their high-intensity efforts to close the gap with IBM: "Yes, I do think that integrated play is a very strong play," Loughridge said via the <a href="">earnings-call transcript</a> on seekingalpha.com. "And if you look at the industry, nobody has that hardware, software, services complement the way we do. Now you may see a lot of businesses putting together strategies along that perspective or describing that future state in that perspective, but if you just look at who's doing it right now, it's really IBM with that hardware, software, services complement. "And you don't build that overnight. We've been working on this for decades (emphasis added). Secondly, I think it's really the strength of those cross-business-unit growth initiatives, and I would return to make the point that in Business Analytics, that cuts across our businesses: growth at 19%; growth markets, 13%; our Smarter Planet content, we did $3 billion, up double-digit; cloud, again, with thousands of engagements, doubling to 2015," Loughridge said. "So one, nobody has that complement of hardware, software and services the way we do. Number two, it takes a long time to build that. We've been at this for decades" (emphasis added). Loughridge's comments are of a piece with those shared by IBM senior vice-president of Systems and Technology Rod Adkins in a telephone conversation last week when I asked for his impressions of Oracle's ambitions to displace IBM as the world's top maker of high-end systems. "As for Oracle/Sun, we'll also continue to hear more of the same from them: in the last year, they've embraced aggressively our point of view about the importance of integration and of delivering highly integrated and highly optimized systems. And that's a good thing," Adkins said. "However, the challenge Oracle has is time: you don't go out and acquire a company and then immediately declare victory, and declare that you've got everything all squared away—it takes years of work to get those software and hardware teams working together. And believe me, we know that from our own experience here at IBM (emphases added). "So Oracle will continue to tell that story but the reality is that they have a one-trick pony called Exadata—that's all they have," Adkins said. (For the full story on Adkins' perspectives and the financial performance of Systems and Technology in the latest quarter, please see <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229001011">Global CIO: IBM Zings Oracle And HP Over Lack Of Vision</a>.) Remember, this isn't just a talk-off; rather, the intense competition between IBM and Oracle at the high end of the market is driven by their shared belief that business customers are becoming increasingly certain that highly engineered,integrated, and optimized systems are the way of the future. And CIOs would be wise to leverage that uncompromising competition to ensure that the real winners are ultimately those CIOs themselves and the businesses that stand to gain from the accelerated innovation that always comes out of such head-to-head battles. Does Larry Ellison need a time machine to catch IBM? Maybe. But trust me on one thing: IBM's going to behave as if he doesn't. RECOMMENDED READING: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228900228">Global CIO: Larry Ellison's 10-Point Plan For World Domination</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229001011">Global CIO: IBM Zings Oracle And HP Over Lack Of Vision</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226500193">Global CIO: Larry Ellison And The New Oracle Rock The Tech World</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227500100">Global CIO: Is IBM Or Apple The World's #1 Tech Brand?</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222500081">Global CIO: Larry Ellison's Top 10 Reasons For Buying Sun</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/reviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000909">Global CIO: Apple Hammers Google Over Tablet Flaws</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000783">Global CIO: HP's New Strategy Will Intensify Battles With IBM And Oracle</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000361">Global CIO: The Top 10 CIO Issues For 2011</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900330">Global CIO: Steve Jobs Declares War On Google</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900335">Global CIO: Apple Storms The Enterprise As iPad And iPhone Surge</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000430">Global CIO: The PC Is Dying; Long Live The iPad!</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000087">Global CIO: The Year Of iPad: Apple Booms In Business And In China</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900483">Global CIO: Inside Steve Jobs' Head: The Supremacy Of Software</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900123">Global CIO: The Top 10 Most Influential IT Vendors (Apple And Facebook?)</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227400318">Global CIO: The Awesome Transformative Power Of The Apple iPad</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224400178">Global CIO: Google CEO Eric Schmidt's Top 10 Reasons Mobile Is #1</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227200199">Global CIO: IBM's Blazing New MainframeWins Raves From Citigroup</a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=225600194">Global CIO: 10 Reasons CIOs Will Get Fired This Year</a> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="1" bordercolor="#0e374b" align="center"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" alt="GlobalCIO" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" style="margin:0 10px 0 10px;"> Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit. To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/showAuthor.jhtml?authorID=1097">page</a>. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/global_cio/index.html">Global CIO</a>, or write to Bob at <a href="mailto:bevans@techweb.com">bevans@techweb.com</a>. </td> </tr> </table>