Ibm Gto 2010
Ibm Gto 2010
Ibm Gto 2010
clock forward to peek into the partners with an impartial take of the world and
world of the future – to wonder at the evolution of IT across business, economic
the advances of society, business and natural systems.
and technology five to ten years
from now. This year’s GTO is no different.
That’s exactly what IBM Research has strived to When IBM set its sights on helping to create a
do since 1982 with the Global Technology smarter planet two years ago, we predicted the
Outlook (GTO). IBM Research and its global evolution of an increasingly instrumented,
community of some of the world’s top scientists intelligent and interconnected world. Since
consider the cultural and business applications that time, the application of technology has
in which technologies will be used – and the helped create real-world monitoring and data
impact they will have on IBM and the world. prediction for water systems, cities and
municipalities, utilities and power grids,
The GTO provides a comprehensive analysis of financial and logistics providers, and traffic and
that vision. In past years the GTO has transportation entities.
predicted such trends as autonomic and cloud
computing, the rise of nanotechnology, and the The next phase of smarter planet looks to build
ability to create smarter cities and smarter upon that progress and momentum. How can
systems through the application of analytics. these systems be optimized, adapted and reused
to create increasingly intelligent modeling and
An intensive year of work goes into each GTO data-based prediction? Can technology help
– generating the ideas, gathering data, debating transform healthcare to provide better patient
the issues with colleagues and peers, and then outcomes while reducing costs? Will advances
presenting a final report to IBM Chairman and in software help business leap past the
CEO Samuel Palmisano. Throughout the performance limitations of hardware? Can new
process, the analysis of the GTO topics focuses computing models like cloud and hybrid
on both the technology at hand and the computing help manage legacy hardware,
business and societal implications of each trend processes and applications? What can be
being analyzed. learned by looking across multiple systems and
platforms that can help optimize workloads?
Inside IBM, the GTO is used to define areas of
focus and investment. Externally, it is shared The 2010 Global Technology Outlook that
broadly with a range of IT influencers - follows takes a far-reaching view into these
including clients, academics, and partners - challenges at a global level and offers insights
through education and client briefings. into the future. This report is designed for
your organization to benefit from them as
This outlook is not designed to singularly much as we have here at IBM.
benefit IBM. In fact, some of the trends
explored may be well beyond IBM’s portfolio of
offerings. And that’s what makes the GTO
Introduction
The increasing complexity of Today, emerging early diagnostics can lead to
healthcare is a major contributor to earlier intervention, resulting in improved
rising costs. At the same time, outcomes and lower costs at the front end. But
healthcare is becoming an IT-based what emerges at the back end are reams and
industry, based on a continuum of reams of data that, when added to the data
machine generated digital already out there, potentially complicates
information. decision making at the point of care.
Evidence generation
The process of transforming data into evidence
is called the generation phase. It is in this phase
that comparative effectiveness and practice-
based evidence studies, using the best available
evidence gained from the scientific method, are
used to make medical decisions.
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Service quality
Through business process transformation and
increasing the use of IT to generate and process
data and to generate data-based evidence —
care providers and related entities can improve
workflow efficiency, increase safety and reduce
errors. This will enable new collaborations
among the various entities in the healthcare
ecosystem, such as providers, insurers, payers,
patients, pharmacies and regulators. It also will
enable new delivery models, such as patient-
centered collaborative care.
Novel incentives
Insurers and services firms may offer financial
incentives to healthcare providers and
practitioners to adopt evidence-based systems,
allowing them to reduce costs while improving
patient care.
Conclusion
As healthcare is evolving to become an
increasingly IT-based industry, evidence rapidly
is becoming its currency. It accelerates the
transport and availability of data; enables new
modeling capabilities, analysis and
consumption; and does so while simplifying a
complex industry.
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The vision of a smarter planet – IBM CEO Sam Palmisano challenged IBMers
one that is highly instrumented, to create 300 smarter solutions in partnership
interconnected and intelligent – is with clients in 2009. More than 1,200 examples
one that already is in motion. were brought forward in every major industry,
Projects underway in smarter city both in the developed and developing world.
programs in locations as diverse as
the Isle of Malta; Dublin, Ireland; As a result, hundreds of projects are underway
and Dubuque, Iowa, are laying the with clients and partners ranging in size from
groundwork. local fire and police departments to country-
level governments. Transportation systems,
financial systems, and energy and transmission
systems are being monitored; environmental
systems including tides and currents being
measured; and millions of transactions are being
captured and analyzed using technology and
solutions designed to help them be better
understood, managed and made smarter.
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In the near future, three software Upper middleware
trends spanning the entire software Today’s complex application portfolios,
stack will significantly impact including legacy, custom and packaged
enterprises and their IT support. applications, support important operational
functions but limit the ability to innovate,
First, at the top layer, or business layer, upper differentiate and compete. The applications’
middleware will give executives increased fixed business processes, rules and information
visibility and control over how their business models frequently make it expensive and time-
operates. consuming to alter operations to reflect the
changing — often dynamic — needs of
Next, at the platform layer, new control businesses. As a result, enterprises operate on
technologies will enable clients to dynamically application logic as opposed to business needs,
determine which elements of their IT stay in- making it increasingly difficult to shed obsolete
house and which elements are “outsourced” to applications and innovate to meet those needs.
a cloud computing provider.
However, a confluence of emerging
Finally, the development of a new technologies — including improved modeling,
programming language can help software analytics, rules engines, discovery mechanisms
developers and consumers more easily access and monitoring tools — is making it possible to
parallel computing abilities through multi-core return more control of business operations to
and hybrid architectures. business executives.
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X10 allows programmers to expose fine-grained
concurrency in their applications, which should
be a good match for the multicore era. It also
enables programmers to naturally describe
heterogeneous computation at the language
level without the tedious message-passing
constructs. X10 has been used to demonstrate a
6x productivity improvement over the C
message passing interface.
Conclusion
Software will play an increasingly important
role in helping to achieve new computing
performance standards and maximizing the
potential of distributed or workload optimized
computing systems.
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The average corporation spends Many more are spending close to 85 percent of
around 70 percent of its IT budget their IT budget for ongoing operations, leaving
to keep existing operations going, only 15 percent available for innovation. This
with a significant portion allocated level of constraint leaves these companies at a
to maintain and improve their high risk to completely lose their IT-driven
legacy equipment. business agility.
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The integrated legacy control loop Last but not least, the ‘Operate’ aspect of the
To help manage and actively handle these legacy control loop ensures continued
legacy classes in a repeatable pattern, a legacy operation, and includes actions to reduce future
control loop should be implemented. This legacy issues. As part of this, a legacy council
control loop would feature three defined would, for example, review all IT procurements
positions: in order to ensure that new acquisitions are
‘legacy proven’.
Conclusion
In order to maintain high business agility and
the ability to differentiate, constant and
Each position in the loop would feature a repeated legacy efficiency improvement with
variety of actions supported by corresponding double digit savings per year in ongoing IT
tool sets and value prediction tools. operations is a must.
There are two ways to apply the legacy control To achieve this, two key imperatives have to be
loop. The legacy control cycle can be applied followed. First, legacy efficiency improvements
selectively to one legacy class, even to one have to be applied in an integrated fashion
single legacy item. But when applied in the across the legacy value stack layers and not just
form of an integrated legacy service offering to one layer at a time. Second, a structured
across several classes, it provides significantly approach needs to be leveraged to guarantee
higher value. repeated savings, which are achieved by
repeatedly applying the legacy control loop
For the ‘Identify’ position of the control loop, a with the three basic steps of identify - improve
legacy dashboard & workbench can be used to – operate.
map applications, data and infrastructure to a
business process – and vice versa. This would
help provide valuable insight into the complex
relationships between infrastructure, data &
applications and the related business processes.
It also could establish a legacy inventory to help
facilitate and maintain continued optimization.
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The ongoing, exponential increase Spectrum constraints are due to both the
in wireless traffic globally is driving limitations of current radio-frequency
the need for more efficient use of allocation and the limitations of radio
both radio spectrum and wireless interference. The wireless infrastructure
infrastructure capacity. capacity is constrained by network bandwidth
limitations, upgrade costs and logistics, and the
legacy of existing installations.
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required to reduce latency for media
applications and to enable advanced services to
overcome performance variability in the
wireless network.
The existing wireless infrastructure
Current wireless network architecture has three New approaches for the future
regions: the radio access network (RAN), the To address these constraints and challenges,
backhaul to the radio network controller (via new technologies are emerging for the future
microwave or fiber), and the core network. wireless infrastructure.
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Over the next several years, there IT suppliers, including IBM, will address these
will be a significant transformation problems by introducing Workload Optimized
of IT delivery, with increasing Systems (WOS) that are pre-integrated and
focus on manageability, reduction optimized for important application domains,
in operating costs, and improving such as data analytics, business applications,
time-to-value for delivering value web/collaboration, compliance and archiving.
from IT to line of business owners
and customers. These WOS will deliver transformational
improvements in client value by integrating and
This will include a selective adoption of optimizing the complete system at all layers.
“private Clouds” and cloud services and a re-
thinking of the traditional layer-by-layer For example, a WOS for data analytics could
approach of building and managing IT systems, transform user interaction with large data
with their multiple layers of applications, warehouses by reducing the variance in the time
middleware, infrastructure software, servers, to satisfy a user query to the data warehouse.
networks, and storage.
Workload optimized continuum
In the traditional approach, integration of the The client value provided by WOS includes
overall “system” happens only in the customer improvements in functionality, reliability,
data center, resulting in significant integration availability, time to deployment (which is also
cost, elongated deployment time, and legacy time-to-value), as well as reductions in
management complexity. The resulting operating costs through better manageability
environment is difficult to adapt to changes in and improved energy efficiency.
demand and usage.
In current industry practice, we see increasing
functionality and client value with
improvements in individual components over
time. For instance, processing based on
transistor density has been increasing with
Moore’s Law (2X every two years). However,
the resulting boost in performance increasingly
is in the form of more parallelism (more cores,
more threads per core). Delivering application
level increases in performance will require
optimization of the software stack to exploit this
parallelism. If such changes are not made,
progress will not keep pace.
Conclusion
Increasing client value will be delivered through
different levels of integration moving through
the continuum of WOS to deliver high levels of
co-design and co-optimization across the
hardware and software stack. Successive
refinement and expansion of customer value
through a multi-year roadmap will be necessary
to overcome any perception that a WOS is a
one-of-a-kind hardware solution for each
Infrastructure and technology application and that many application/workload
In addition to looking at some WOS examples, classes can be supported by a small set of
one also must investigate the underlying system workload optimized platforms.
infrastructure. In looking at many important
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