IBM pushes ‘smarter computing’ among clients

Thursday, February 2, 2012

AS they focus the year on retail and distribution, IBM Philippines hopes to introduce the concept of “smarter computing” for local clients.

Smarter computing, according to IBM, is an approach to information technology that aids organizations in realizing greater efficiencies, improved reliability and better performance at lower costs.

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The strategy centers on using analytics to exploit vast amounts of data for business goals, optimized systems designed for specific tasks and managing as much of IT as possible using cloud technologies.

Last Thursday, the company held a smarter solutions series for local clients and business partners focused on retail and manufacturing.

Lope Doromal Jr., chief technologist of IBM Philippines, said IT personnel of companies face huge challenges, with huge data files stored each year but relatively no rise in IT budgets.

He said that some 1.2 Zettabytes (1.2 trillion gigabytes) of data is stored all around the world’s servers and that it grows 42 percent each year. But most IT budgets of companies grow just 0.8 percent a year.

“The challenge of IT managers is to do more with less,” Doromal said.

Because of this situation, Doromal said companies tend to get stuck with incomplete and untrusted data and inflexible IT infrastructure, some of which are five to 10 years old.

With smarter computing, Doromal said they address these problems by designing the system to integrate and analyze all sources of data, match workload systems that have different functions and manage things using cloud technologies.

Though there are many features being offered in the cloud, Doromal said it is not necessary for companies to move everything to the cloud but instead, take some features of the cloud and integrate it into their systems.

He assured that their approach can work with existing systems.