IBM VP Dishes Up Statistics For Infrastructure Growth
March 8, 2017 Dan Burger
The metamorphosis of IBM has been a journey from typewriters to mainframes, to mini-mainframes to PCs, to infrastructure, to cloud computing, to big data analytics and most recently to cognitive computing. IT infrastructure for cognitive workloads was on the mind of Tom Rosamilia as he spoke to the IBM Business Partners several weeks ago at the PartnerWorld conference in Las Vegas.
Rosamilia, the senior vice president of IBM Systems group, emphasized the delivery of cognitive insights would depend on infrastructure and that partners would help create the solutions, while customers would choose how they want to deploy it – most likely with a combination of on-premise equipment and cloud services.
“There isn’t a unit in IBM that will not be following the cognitive-on-cloud script,” he told partners. “The first step is the cloud. Every client wants to know how to get there. That doesn’t mean they are all going to go there or go there 100 percent.”
When they go and how much of their infrastructure they put in the cloud will vary with specific industries accelerating or putting the brakes on the transitions.
Building a case with statistics is a popular sales technique, even when talking to a roomful of sales people, which is what the business partners are, of course. Here are some key stats that Rosamilia used to emphasize the opportunities in cloud and cognitive.
In 2015, 1 percent of developers said they were going to build cognitive into their applications. Last year, the same question tallied a 33 percent response. By 2019, Rosamilia predicted, it will be 50 percent. By the end of this year, 15 percent of financial institutions say they will be in full-scale production using Watson solutions, according to the IBM VP.
Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president of IBM Systems group.
“Sometimes we think of infrastructure as flat [in terms of revenue growth],” Rosamilia told the partners before tacking on that “cognitive infrastructure opportunities are growing at nearly 60 percent. There are pockets of the infrastructure marketplace that are hot and cognitive infrastructure is one of them.”
Between 2017 and 2020 cognitive infrastructure will become a $31 billion business, he said.
Hybrid cloud environments will be in 80 percent of IT organizations by 2020.
Sixty-five percent of banks will have Blockchain solutions in production in the next three years.
The impact of cognitive will be substantial as will the shift in infrastructure.
Modern data-centric applications that are dependent on advanced analytics, machine learning, deep learning, AI and cognitive computing require much higher I/O throughput that traditional I/O architectures can’t provide. So, it will largely be on the partner community to help organizations get the infrastructure needed to connect with backend systems.
More opportunities for the partners will arise in flash storage where Rosamilia said the 2016 growth rate depending on industry and geography was 2016 was between 50 percent and 70 percent. Although those astronomical figures were largely due to the small quantities of units being purchased, the anticipated growth between now and 2020 will be in the 10 percent to 20 percent range.”It’s not slowing,” Rosamilia said. “It’s getting bigger. But it’s hard to keep up those big numbers.”
Software defined storage, a market that Gartner puts IBM first in market share, is predicted to grow at 60 percent each year through 2020.
One other market segment that the IBM VP highlighted to whet the appetite of the partners was SAP on Power.
“At the end of last year, we had SAP HANA on Power sold to 600 clients. Five hundred of those were sold during 2016, with 75 percent sold through the partners,” Rosamilia said.
“We have 6,000 SAP customers running on Power. They are all going to move to HANA at some point in time.”
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IBM VP: “We have 6,000 SAP customers running on Power. They are all going to move to HANA at some point in time.”
Or they are going to Oracle, Microsoft, Infor and others – because nobody likes to be forced to changes.