IBM Rises Through the Vertical Cloud: Dual Interviews with the CIO Office

Grazed from The Huffington Post.  Author: James Grundvig.

In the same week, IBM put out two press releases on cloud analytics. Who would have thought that possible a few years ago? Did the big, rigid, and smart IBM of mainframe, Deep Blue, and Watson fame really migrate to the cloud?  Yes. They did it not just once, but twice.

First, internally with a secret and successful project called ‘Blue Insight,’ which IBM launched five years ago with great foresight from the CIO’s office to cull waste, duplication, and inefficiencies, while deliver data analytics to all of IBM’s business units and hundreds of thousands global employees. Then externally, IBM tailored its cloud solution offerings for industry-specific customers, with announcements this week on L’Oreal USA and the healthcare system of Saudi Arabia…

To paraphrase Martin Sheen’s character in Apocalypse Now, "If you’re going to get of the boat, you gotta go all the way."  And all the way into cloud computing IBM has moved with some surprising dexterity for a multinational corporation. Perhaps such nimbleness was due to IBM having been there before at the threshold of change, from the 1980s mainframe era to the client server decade of the 1990s…

Read more from the source @ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-grundvig/ibm-rises-through-the-ver_b_3292528.html