My First IBM Think

I am pretty fortunate that I get to go to a good number of industry events. Always excited to meet other technologists and practitioners bettering our craft. IBM does have a special place in my heart as I got my start there and learned a good deal of software engineering skills at IBM. After a decade in industry outside of IBM, went to my first ever IBM Event, the big one, IBM Think 2019.

San Francisco has Rain?!

For those of us who attended IBM Think this year in San Francisco, the rain was a common topic of discussion. I must have been to the Bay Area a few dozen times and never have I seen rain. Now understanding that Northern California (and California in general) have been in a pretty severe drought, the rain is most certainly needed. Thankfully for Christmas my manager got us swanky branded North Face jackets (in the picture above) so I was able to stay mostly dry. IBM also provided buses from core hotels to the Moscone. I was fortunate that Lyft was also readily accessible and reasonable.

Toney and Ginni

One of the keynote speakers at IBM Think was no other than skating legend Toney Hawk. Toney’s talk about “always getting back up” after many crashes and wipe outs in his career. I remember one of my first games on my Sega Dreamcast in 1999 was Toney Hawk Pro Skater. Warm and fuzzies to my teenage years check! Ironically this was the first time I have heard Ginni Rometty’s voice. Would always read articles published by her or the press coverage, finally the opportunity to hear Ginni speak. Throughout her keynote, two themes emerged. First that “Everything Changes” and second the ushering in of the “Cognitive Enterprise”.

Cognitive Enterprise, the new e-business

For those of us who remember IBM’s big push into “e-business” in the 1990s as the future for the enterprise, IBM has been pushing the “Cognitive Enterprise” heavily at IBM Think. The combination of Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, and Block Chain will revolutionize the way enterprises go to market. Going back to “e-business”, IBM predicted that the sales of online books and movies would take off. Now this was the time where Amazon was starting to build out their online presence. Fast forward to today, Amazon is the operating system of the internet and market-cap is over five times that of IBMs. Imagine IBM’s predictions in mid 1990s as Louis Gerstner was turning IBM around. IBM was looking at a brave new world developing technology that powered the commerce of the internet such as WebSphere, the mark on distributed systems is huge. The technology evolution continues.

Can the Elephant Still Dance?

Louis Gerstner’s book, “Who Says an Elephant Can’t Dance” described turning around a crumbling IBM in the 1990s. A lot of what Louis accomplished was being furthered out by Sam Palmisano who was the successor of Louis and the CEO when I was at IBM. Comparing a handful of events that I went tom KubeCon vs IBM Think. KubeCon is a convention that the Cloud Native Computing Foundation [CNCF] puts on a few times a year. The CNCF can be viewed as the open source frameworks powering the next generation of cloud first workloads. The amount of startups and industry disruptors at KubeCon was huge. These type of disruptors seemed to have been missing at IBM Think. Imagine that you are a startup or a firm impacting millions of users, would you reach for an IBM stack first? IBM and especially with their pending acquisition of Red Hat have broadened the product portfolio to be the solution for Hybrid Cloud. Still many enterprises depend on IBM Technology such as the mainframe. A statistic I heard at IBM Think is that 70% of online transactions touch a mainframe at some point, amazing! Though shaking this enterprise image which is so engrained with IBM will be difficult.

Forge Ahead!

IBM does have the ability to define and create new markets. I am particularly excited around their advancements of Quantum Computing and how the world of the future can leverage. IBM had over 100+ sessions addressing Cloud Native technologies. I am hopeful for IBM to continue to innovate in the future. Spending the last 10 years or so outside of IBM, I do perceive IBM has a little antiquated at sometimes and a little slow to adapt because their product lines are so vast. I spent years selling against IBM at Red Hat and Mesosphere and taking a fresh look at IBM again at Think levels out my perspective. Compared to firms that focus on a few concerns, yes IBM is not as fast to react. Though enterprises that have thousands of concerns still rely on IBM. Looking forward to a not so rainy Think next year!