Power Systems Marketing VP Sees Big Data Bulls Eye

April 15, 2013 Dan Burger

The new role of data in modern business is on the mind of IBM‘s vice president of marketing for Power Systems Zarina Stanford. Transactional data has lost none of its importance, but the need to analyze data quickly is where the business value is today and organizations are already capitalizing on analytics.

“Think about IBM i,” Stanford says. “The core is cognitive computing–sorting through information from DB2 and piecing it together.”

Big data means big value to this marketing executive and she sees IBM i on Power Systems as playing an important role in the industries where the demand for more powerful analytics is greatest.

The specific industries are retail, distribution, banking, healthcare, and telco. IBM will “hone-in” on these markets with its marketing programs emphasizing analytic capabilities on each of the Power Systems platforms IBM i, AIX, and Linux.

Stanford, who was providing an overview of IBM marketing programs to IT Jungle in a briefing that took place last week at the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition in Austin, Texas, singled out the ISV community as an important advantage.

The IBM i ecosystem, she pointed out, was built on ISV applications.

Although not the size that it once was, the IBM i ISV community is still a big number. In terms of next gen applications, the ISVs have moved in the right direction, however, an overall move to next generation apps is generally inaccurate.

“We have to re-energize ISV support,” Stanford said, “through different industries and geographies.”

IBM marketing will benefit ISVs that are strong in the industries where analytics and big data prioritization is taking place and where the ISVs have next generation applications designed with state of the art technology. That will generally happen at the high end of the IBM i ecosystem, where the largest ISVs are active.

One of the mostly undiscovered sources for next gen apps is the open source community. In the IBM i community, the interest in PHP has aided the connection to open source apps on i. Incremental progress can be seen there, with hopes that it will continue and maybe someday become pervasive.