02
Sat, Nov
2 New Articles

Yo! Who Is Da Man in E-Biz on Demand?

Analysis of News Events
Typography
  • Smaller Small Medium Big Bigger
  • Default Helvetica Segoe Georgia Times

At PartnerWorld 2003 in New Orleans, IBM had a story to tell about its newest business transformation strategy. That strategy, called "e-business on demand," is focused primarily on organizations that--according to IBM--are on a journey toward virtualized IT services. The concept in its barest outlines is relatively simple: IBM is offering products that will enable customers to build information services that are not reliant upon fixed IT infrastructures. When a business cycle heats up, these on-demand information services can add IT capacity as needed, transparently. But when business cycles cool down, these same information services will be able to ramp down, shedding capacity and infrastructure to remain manageable with fewer personnel resources.

More Than Just Capacity Planning

However, there is more to e-biz on demand than mere capacity planning, and it's this key difference that will enable IBM to separate itself from the other purveyors of hardware and software services. IBM is building a technology within its products that will enable its goods and services to be slipped into these virtualized infrastructures. These products, like its blade servers and storage devices, along with its various software brands and operating systems, are designed to minimize the complexity of the modern IT environment. They are modular, open, and highly configurable with integrated management tools that maximize the limited resources of IT personnel.

E-biz on demand is also a blueprint for externalizing IT services when the need arises, allowing companies to focus upon their core business missions, instead of the endless cycle of system maintenance and upgrade. But, in order for organizations to realize the full benefits of an e-biz on demand architecture, they must look beyond the traditional requirements of IT and into the heart of what their core business processes are about.

The State of the e-Biz Revolution

IBM looks at e-biz on demand as the next logical phase in the business revolution that began in the 1990s. The first phase was the transformation of traditional business organizations into e-business enterprises. In that first phase, which IBM calls the "access" phase, organizations embraced the newest IT goods and services for productivity and connectivity to global markets. According to IBM, as companies saw the potential for exploiting the Internet and the global marketplace, they "accessed" the technologies that would extend their reach out into the virtual global community. And indeed, this rapid embrace has led to tremendous advances in the ways and means by which companies make their profits. In many cases, this embrace transformed the way organizations worked, in marketing, order gathering, manufacturing, fulfillment, and distribution.

e-Biz and the Economic Climate

However, IBM sees that initial business transformation as only the first phase. Why? Because each new technology brought into the organization has also brought an incredible infrastructural cost, in terms of equipment, personnel, and the complexity of internal business processes. In good economic times, companies have been able to shoulder that added expense and complexity in order to reap the economic benefits and to propel them into new markets opportunities.

However, there is a natural cycle to the business climate, times when the economy can not, for a variety of reasons, support the kinds of growth needed to sustain the past infrastructural investments in IT. Times like these.

Indeed, the 2000 collapse of the dot-com investment bubble that signaled the beginning of the current economic downturn landed many companies in a quagmire of complex, highly interlaced IT information systems that can no longer be supported by the economics that spawned them.

For many organizations, abandoning these highly complex systems is not an option: They represent vital links into other organizations and markets that still feed the overall core business. But the expense of maintaining these systems--and the inability to scale them back to a reasonable size--is preventing these companies from reinvesting in their own core business processes. This means less innovation within the company itself and fewer opportunities for the organization to reinvent itself to meet the needs of a newer, scaled-down marketplace. Moreover, by the time the economic cycles refresh themselves, those e-biz systems that are currently in place may no longer be resilient enough to respond to the new business climates.

Can a Virtualized IT Infrastructure Be Built?

It is this realistic re-examination of e-business and technology in the variable climates of economic expansion and contraction that has prompted IBM to push its technologies forward in search of real business solutions. And this push is aimed to answer some key questions:

  1. Can organizations build a real virtualized IT infrastructure?
  2. Can this infrastructure be sufficiently resilient to respond--on demand--to variations in business climate and/or capacity demand?
  3. What would such an "ideal" infrastructure do a company's core business processes?
  4. How can IBM build products and services that will integrate and perform flawlessly within this infrastructure?

Clearly, these are not trivial questions, for either IBM or its customers, and the solutions that IBM is proposing are not currently "out of the box" products that will solve every need. Indeed, in order to achieve the goal of a virtualized, on-demand infrastructure, not only will IBM need to transform its products, but organizations will need to transform their business models.

It is this business transformation--from a static, resource-intensive e-business infrastructure into a dynamic, virtualized infrastructure--that IBM has termed "e-business on demand." It's an infrastructure that is available when needed but does not require constant maintenance or expense when its capacity is not required.

But is e-business on demand a real initiative on the part of IBM, or is it an IT pipe dream that IBM marketing has grasped hold of in this struggling economy? Can e-business on demand really work?

Will e-Business on Demand Work?

There's no question that historically business--and especially large-scale business organizations--would rather have a service-centered IT infrastructure. Indeed, going all the way back to the 1960s, businesses were generally very happy with leasing both the equipment and the software directly from IBM, including the systems engineers who helped to keep the information systems running. At that time, IBM's market predominance was supreme, and it was IBM's competitors who wanted to sell peripheral equipment to be attached to IBM's hardware that brought the successful anti-trust suit that eventually opened up the IT infrastructure to market forces.

In the past, especially during economic lulls, organizations have sought the cheapest means of outsourcing their IT infrastructure--through service centers, consulting contracts, and, most recently, ASP offerings. However, every time the economic cycles shift upward, the IT organizations within companies resurrect their own importance and their desire to bring IT services back in-house. Why?

Why Not Outsourcing for Everything?

First of all, during economic upswings, equipment and personnel seem least expensive to organizations, while the demand on the service providers seem particularly stretched to provide adequate customer support. It's at these times that IT directors and influencers can successfully argue, "We can do a better job in-house."

But secondly, there are always core business processes that need to be reinvented to keep the organization profitable in the marketplace. To support the reconfiguration of core business processes, IT has in the past almost always been called upon to build new services or expand existing services. Those requirements have--in the past--been better handled by dedicated employees who understand the business goals and who can negotiate the parameters of the reinvention through their roles within the organization.

The Nature of E-Business on Demand Technology

However, the tools that IBM is proposing to bring to the argument with e-business on demand are of a different ilk than the relatively simple IT outsourcing services of past years.

Consider IBM's "capacity on demand" servers, which place highly configurable, fully blown-out boxes that are ready to expand with the turn of a key:

  • Customers pay for only what they use.
  • Consider Web services, which allow the potential importation of software modules to seamlessly interface with and expand application services into a software infrastructure.
  • Consider IBM's computing grid initiatives, where virtualized computational power can be spread over continents of machines and applications.
  • Consider IBM's autonomic initiatives, by which machines and software are becoming increasingly "self-healing" and "self-configuring" without human intervention.

There is no question that the technology that is being invented and delivered today--the nuts and bolts of the IT infrastructure--is substantially different than it was in eras past. If one combines those elements of technology advancement with the requirement that devices and applications adhere to open, international standards, one can see that the scenery and props for a truly virtualized IT infrastructure are being hoisted into place. Are all the pieces in place yet? No! But they are arriving daily, quietly, incrementally, while businesses today are weathering the economic lull.

What's Still Missing? Who Da Man?

What is still missing, however, is the overall understanding and commitment of the business organizations themselves. Are they ready to make use of such a virtualized IT infrastructure? Have they re-aligned their business processes to take advantage of these advances? Will they have the foresight to embrace the e-business on demand infrastructure?

This is the question that IBM's e-business on demand initiative is asking each of us.

IBM says that it is looking for partners, in the community of e-business organizations, that are ready for this next phase of business transformation. It believes these organizations are the ones that recognize e-business is not an end in itself, but the beginning of a journey toward virtualized resources. It recognizes that these organizations will need to transform their core business processes to meet the goals that such an infrastructure provides. But IBM itself is willing to shoulder the burden of providing the technologies that will make such an e-business on demand work.

So, yo! Who is "da man" in e-business on demand? IBM has raised its hand, to point the way toward the future of IT, to lead organizations out of the complexity of today's IT quagmire. This was the message that IBM brought to PartnerWorld 2003. It's a message that each of us should consider as we prepare our organizations for the renewed 21st Century economy.

Yo!

Thomas M. Stockwell is the Editor in Chief of MC Press, LLC. He has written extensively about program development, project management, IT management, and IT consulting and has been a frequent contributor to many midrange periodicals. He has authored numerous white papers for iSeries solutions providers. His most recent consulting assignments have been as a Senior Industry Analyst working with IBM on the iSeries, on the mid-market, and specifically on WebSphere brand positioning. He welcomes your comments about this or other articles and can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Thomas Stockwell

Thomas M. Stockwell is an independent IT analyst and writer. He is the former Editor in Chief of MC Press Online and Midrange Computing magazine and has over 20 years of experience as a programmer, systems engineer, IT director, industry analyst, author, speaker, consultant, and editor.  

 

Tom works from his home in the Napa Valley in California. He can be reached at ITincendiary.com.

 

 

BLOG COMMENTS POWERED BY DISQUS

LATEST COMMENTS

Support MC Press Online

$

Book Reviews

Resource Center

  • SB Profound WC 5536 Have you been wondering about Node.js? Our free Node.js Webinar Series takes you from total beginner to creating a fully-functional IBM i Node.js business application. You can find Part 1 here. In Part 2 of our free Node.js Webinar Series, Brian May teaches you the different tooling options available for writing code, debugging, and using Git for version control. Brian will briefly discuss the different tools available, and demonstrate his preferred setup for Node development on IBM i or any platform. Attend this webinar to learn:

  • SB Profound WP 5539More than ever, there is a demand for IT to deliver innovation. Your IBM i has been an essential part of your business operations for years. However, your organization may struggle to maintain the current system and implement new projects. The thousands of customers we've worked with and surveyed state that expectations regarding the digital footprint and vision of the company are not aligned with the current IT environment.

  • SB HelpSystems ROBOT Generic IBM announced the E1080 servers using the latest Power10 processor in September 2021. The most powerful processor from IBM to date, Power10 is designed to handle the demands of doing business in today’s high-tech atmosphere, including running cloud applications, supporting big data, and managing AI workloads. But what does Power10 mean for your data center? In this recorded webinar, IBMers Dan Sundt and Dylan Boday join IBM Power Champion Tom Huntington for a discussion on why Power10 technology is the right strategic investment if you run IBM i, AIX, or Linux. In this action-packed hour, Tom will share trends from the IBM i and AIX user communities while Dan and Dylan dive into the tech specs for key hardware, including:

  • Magic MarkTRY the one package that solves all your document design and printing challenges on all your platforms. Produce bar code labels, electronic forms, ad hoc reports, and RFID tags – without programming! MarkMagic is the only document design and print solution that combines report writing, WYSIWYG label and forms design, and conditional printing in one integrated product. Make sure your data survives when catastrophe hits. Request your trial now!  Request Now.

  • SB HelpSystems ROBOT GenericForms of ransomware has been around for over 30 years, and with more and more organizations suffering attacks each year, it continues to endure. What has made ransomware such a durable threat and what is the best way to combat it? In order to prevent ransomware, organizations must first understand how it works.

  • SB HelpSystems ROBOT GenericIT security is a top priority for businesses around the world, but most IBM i pros don’t know where to begin—and most cybersecurity experts don’t know IBM i. In this session, Robin Tatam explores the business impact of lax IBM i security, the top vulnerabilities putting IBM i at risk, and the steps you can take to protect your organization. If you’re looking to avoid unexpected downtime or corrupted data, you don’t want to miss this session.

  • SB HelpSystems ROBOT GenericCan you trust all of your users all of the time? A typical end user receives 16 malicious emails each month, but only 17 percent of these phishing campaigns are reported to IT. Once an attack is underway, most organizations won’t discover the breach until six months later. A staggering amount of damage can occur in that time. Despite these risks, 93 percent of organizations are leaving their IBM i systems vulnerable to cybercrime. In this on-demand webinar, IBM i security experts Robin Tatam and Sandi Moore will reveal:

  • FORTRA Disaster protection is vital to every business. Yet, it often consists of patched together procedures that are prone to error. From automatic backups to data encryption to media management, Robot automates the routine (yet often complex) tasks of iSeries backup and recovery, saving you time and money and making the process safer and more reliable. Automate your backups with the Robot Backup and Recovery Solution. Key features include:

  • FORTRAManaging messages on your IBM i can be more than a full-time job if you have to do it manually. Messages need a response and resources must be monitored—often over multiple systems and across platforms. How can you be sure you won’t miss important system events? Automate your message center with the Robot Message Management Solution. Key features include:

  • FORTRAThe thought of printing, distributing, and storing iSeries reports manually may reduce you to tears. Paper and labor costs associated with report generation can spiral out of control. Mountains of paper threaten to swamp your files. Robot automates report bursting, distribution, bundling, and archiving, and offers secure, selective online report viewing. Manage your reports with the Robot Report Management Solution. Key features include:

  • FORTRAFor over 30 years, Robot has been a leader in systems management for IBM i. With batch job creation and scheduling at its core, the Robot Job Scheduling Solution reduces the opportunity for human error and helps you maintain service levels, automating even the biggest, most complex runbooks. Manage your job schedule with the Robot Job Scheduling Solution. Key features include:

  • LANSA Business users want new applications now. Market and regulatory pressures require faster application updates and delivery into production. Your IBM i developers may be approaching retirement, and you see no sure way to fill their positions with experienced developers. In addition, you may be caught between maintaining your existing applications and the uncertainty of moving to something new.

  • LANSAWhen it comes to creating your business applications, there are hundreds of coding platforms and programming languages to choose from. These options range from very complex traditional programming languages to Low-Code platforms where sometimes no traditional coding experience is needed. Download our whitepaper, The Power of Writing Code in a Low-Code Solution, and:

  • LANSASupply Chain is becoming increasingly complex and unpredictable. From raw materials for manufacturing to food supply chains, the journey from source to production to delivery to consumers is marred with inefficiencies, manual processes, shortages, recalls, counterfeits, and scandals. In this webinar, we discuss how:

  • The MC Resource Centers bring you the widest selection of white papers, trial software, and on-demand webcasts for you to choose from. >> Review the list of White Papers, Trial Software or On-Demand Webcast at the MC Press Resource Center. >> Add the items to yru Cart and complet he checkout process and submit

  • Profound Logic Have you been wondering about Node.js? Our free Node.js Webinar Series takes you from total beginner to creating a fully-functional IBM i Node.js business application.

  • SB Profound WC 5536Join us for this hour-long webcast that will explore:

  • Fortra IT managers hoping to find new IBM i talent are discovering that the pool of experienced RPG programmers and operators or administrators with intimate knowledge of the operating system and the applications that run on it is small. This begs the question: How will you manage the platform that supports such a big part of your business? This guide offers strategies and software suggestions to help you plan IT staffing and resources and smooth the transition after your AS/400 talent retires. Read on to learn: