Smarter computing

Smarter computing: the IT infrastructure that enables a Smarter Planet

Three years ago, we began describing the Smarter Planet that we saw emerging. It was a world in which the primary industries—transportation, healthcare, energy—were becoming more instrumented and interconnected, and intelligent, producing data that could be used to improve the quality of our lives and our work across a variety of industries.

Over this time, we also recognised that there was a pattern to the way that most successful companies were approaching their IT infrastructure. They were thinking about computing in new ways—and using it to create formidable opportunities for growth and innovation…despite facing such challenges as tremendous demands for service, inflexible infrastructures, flat budgets and incomplete, unreliable data.

Through a new approach we call Smarter Computing, enterprises can tackle these constraints. They can leverage all of the data in their enterprise, optimise systems for workloads and manage their IT infrastructure in a much more cloud-like fashion, for dramatically improved economics and performance.

Smarter computing has three characteristics:

Designed for data

Companies are challenged to harness all available information. In fact, 89% of CEOs say they want better insight through business intelligence and analytics. An infrastructure that is designed for data means extending beyond traditional sources of data to generate insight by leveraging new forms of information.

Tuned to the task

This means matching workloads to systems that are optimised for the workloads’ characteristics. With optimised systems, the total cost per workload can be reduced by up to 55%, delivering greater performance and improved IT economics.

Managed with cloud technologies

Cloud computing is an opportunity to reinvent IT. It can help evolve data center capabilities to reduce costs while improving service delivery. 60% of CIOs plan to use cloud technologies and 55% of business executives believe cloud enables business transformation.

If an enterprise can think holistically about its IT infrastructure, it can implement a Smarter Computing model and gain the benefits we’ve seen with our own clients—double capacity for IT services, flat IT costs and the ability to implement new breakthrough services.

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Bernie Spang

Director Database Software and Systems Strategy

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About Bernie

Bernie Spang is currently Director, Strategy and Marketing, Database Software & Systems for IBM Information Management. He has held various engineering, business development, strategy and marketing roles at IBM over 25 years. He also earned a Masters of Computer Engineering from Syracuse University during that time. Prior to joining IBM, he earned his Engineering degree from Stevens Institute of Technology.

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