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I recently returned from IBM’s annual STG Analyst Conference, and it was way, way different than any I’ve attended in the past. Those differences are very instructive: they show the metamorphosis of IBM from a company that makes money selling computers, storage, networking, software, and stuff to a company whose mission is to help customers solve their business problems with technology. When you strip it down to the fundamentals, it’s really about helping customers become more competitive. This can mean helping public agencies become more efficient, or it can mean giving business clients the tools they need to out-compete their competitors.
IBM analyst conferences in the past have been chock full of system-specific content. There are the state-of-the-business addresses by executives from Mainframes/System i/System p/System x/Storage product groups. There are the deep dives into current offerings, future initiatives, and system roadmaps. There are the talks about what kinds of customers they’re selling to, what kinds of processing they expect those customers to have in the future, and the like. That’s all well and good, but it’s also the kind of information that analysts can – and do – get year ‘round.
Aside from a single breakout session with specific hardware execs, this recent conference was not like anything I just described. The large majority of the material presented was based on a far more customer-centric examination of client problems and challenges. IBM is examining those challenges through the prism of its Smarter Planet initiative – which, I admit, seems a little ‘kumbaya’ to me in some areas. But in terms of what’s coming down the road, it’s right on target. Customers are dealing with an increasingly fast-paced world: increased competition from all angles, brutal pressure on pricing, and relentless product cycles. Add to this orders of magnitude more data flying at them from disparate, ever-increasing sources, and customers have quite a hill to climb.
IBM’s message was this: “We can help you deal with these challenges, because we have, first and foremost, lots of smart people who have been looking at the same things you’re experiencing. And we have lots of smart people who know your industry, because we’ve been in your industry for decades. And those smart people have some pretty good ideas that we’ve turned into products, services, and software, and we’ll put those things together to solve your business challenge – not your technology challenge, your business challenge.”
If you attend enough of these things, you’ll recognize the “Business Is Getting Tougher” message from the preamble of every marketing message from every vendor, from IBM down to a keyboard manufacturer. The keyboard manufacturer will say, “Times are tough… business is moving faster… things are hard… we see this too, and we’re here to help. We’re responding to this pressure with our KTX-573-8(A) integrated business keyboard. It’s wireless to help you deal with more data faster than ever, it also has… “ (Insert more tedious features here). If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice a gap between their high-flying rhetoric and the solution they immediately begin pitching.
Here’s where IBM is different now: they’re starting to fill in the gap between the big-picture problem (“Business is hard!”) and real solutions. They don’t just instantly start talking about gear and software, and the specific solution the bundle of the two provides. They’ve connected the dots from big-picture problem > specific symptoms > actual solution with well-thought-out discussions centered on those actual solutions.
Case in point: IBM’s emphasis on predictive analytics. We believe that this is the ‘next big thing’, and we were interested in hearing details about IBM’s approach. What they discussed at the conference is how the application of predictive analytics can help customers navigate the increasingly competitive world. Not from a hardware perspective, or even a software perspective; they discussed it in terms of industry segments, with examples of specific client engagements. Other vendors are starting down the predictive analytics track and more are sure to follow, but it seems that they are mostly still in the mode of presenting the high-level picture, then jumping immediately to, “Here’s the exact gear and software that’ll fix that.” It’s in the covering of that information gap that customers will find real business value.
So with this analyst conference, I see IBM finally showing the same face to the analyst community that they’ve been working toward showing in the corporate suites and, hopefully, in the field. Their game isn’t selling IBM gear; it’s partnering with customers to solve business problems. That’s a higher-level game. I see other vendors moving this way – H-P, Oracle, and even Dell, given some of their latest acquisitions. But for right now, IBM seems to have captured the high ground. |
