Acquisition has been a key component in the growth of IBM’s software portfolio. Infodyne was recently acquired to for its low latency capabilities. Steve Mills fields questions on the scope of IBM’s software offerings, and how IBM software can spur growth in the financial markets.
Steve Mills is Senior Vice President and Group Executive of IBM’s software business, which numbers $20 billion in revenues and 50,000 in employees. Over recent years, acquisition has been a key component of the growth of the software portfolio. Most recently, Infodyne was acquired to add low latency capabilities. We found out some more about the breadth and depth of IBM’s software offerings, and how they can be leveraged to kick start growth in the financial markets.
Steve presented at the SIFMA Technology Management Conference 2008, Tuesday June 9th during the Opening General Session.
Q: What is your role and what are your responsibilities within IBM?
Steve Mills: I’m responsible for managing the development, marketing, sales and support of
IBM’s software portfolio.
Q: How big is the Software Group within IBM and how does it fit into the entire organisation?
Steve: IBM’s software business contributes $20 billion of IBM’s overall revenue and 40 percent of its profits. Our industry leading middleware products enable customers to integrate their business operations. Our software powers more than 100,000 enterprises around the world.
IBM’s global software business has grown to more than 50,000 employees, including 25,000 software developers and 15,000 sales and technical support personnel in more than 150 countries. We’ve added 69 acquired companies to our software business since 2003, creating the industry’s largest business software portfolio.
Q: What IBM software technologies are finding most traction within the financial markets?
Steve: The IBM portfolio of products uses several current and emerging computing technologies to enable new levels of performance. The technologies include large-scale parallel computing platforms, hybrid computing platforms, high-speed networks and storage, middleware and application-development environments. All have already been proven through IBM’s deep strategic partnerships with leading application developers and end-users in several industry, government and academic consortia.
The IBM portfolio contains components that can be deployed to provide fundamental advantage across the spectrum of trading and analytic activities. From a software perspective, our Websphere portfolio has tremendous traction within financial markets. For example, Websphere MQ is used by 90% of the Fortune 100 and all top 20 Global Fortune 500 banks. We recently acquired Infodyne to bolster our software portfolio for financial markets. Infodyne is a leader in high-speed platforms and data feed connectors. Combined with IBM’s Websphere technology, it will help our clients extend transactional integrity to low-latency environments.
Q: What do you expect to be the next significant steps in technology innovation?
Steve: Existing systems can handle increasingly diverse workloads and deliver excellent price/performance. However, they will be unable to keep pace with the continuing explosive growth in messaging volume and the continuing increase in demands for processing speed. Several emerging technologies are already plotted on the roadmaps of today’s major firms. For example, acceleration, hybrid systems, ultrascale computing and enterprise stream processing are poised to provide solutions to some of the most vexing issues for financial firms. A significant area of interest is exemplified in our partnership with TD Bank Financial Group, where we are exploring the use of our Stream Computing software system which will utilise the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer.
Q: How do you believe technology can be deployed to help prevent another sub-prime crisis?
Steve: Let’s start with the fact that technology is always going to be an enabler - so the word ‘help’ is key. Technology can certainly improve the view of data across an enterprise. One direction to pursue is to leverage information management to enforce a better management of risk appetite - which can provide balance between long term and short term profitability within an acceptable risk profile. Another avenue is about enabling better reactiveness to business conditions, event and alerts, through real-time information dissemination and visualisation.
Q: Without saying too much, can you touch on what you’ll be covering in your SIFMA presentation?
Steve: I will discuss the innovative solutions today’s leading firms are deploying to drive sustainable growth, manage risk, and achieve competitive advantage.In the face of commoditisation and fierce competition, financial institutions have continued to thrive by innovating and deploying advanced technologies. Firms have long benefited from the edge provided by access to proprietary information and market insights, but these advantages will come under significant pressure over the next decade as two inexorable trends accelerate: transparency and speed.
