Outside Innovation

OPEN LETTER TO IBM Watson Health: Is It Too Late for Patients to Drive This Initiative?

I’m psyched about the launch of IBM’s Watson Health Business Unit.  Now that I spend about 50% of my time in the healthcare world working on customer co-designed health and wellness initiatives, I’m very interested in technology advances that will improve the lives of patients and their caregiver partners. However, I’m concerned that IBM is following the money and may be missing an opportunity to really innovate to create patient-friendly and patient-centered solutions.

On Monday, April 13^th, IBM announced a series of interconnected announcements laying out its growing health information ecosystem. This is a really smart place for IBM to be investing and leveraging its AI, cloud computing, security, and mobile technologies. By being a trusted custodian and aggregator of patients’ health information, and using the insights gleaned from Watson’s pattern matching and inference engines, IBM could speed up accurate diagnoses and spot patterns that contribute to breakthrough research. But I’m not convinced that patients are at the center of IBM’s thinking.

Here are the highlights (the wording is IBM’s; the emphasis is mine):

Can IBM Be a Major Player in the Apple Enterprise Ecosystem?

As I mentioned last week, in my post, “Enterprise Customers Forged the Apple/IBM Ecosystem,” what tickled me about the exclusive worldwide partnership announced by IBM and Apple on 7/15/14 was that it was a great example of IBM’s running around in front of the customer parade. Enterprise customers—led by their CEOs, sales execs, and top-earning rainmakers—had already voted with their proverbial feet and adopted Apple iPads and iPhones as their devices of choice for getting work done on the go. That meant that their IT organizations had to adapt by accommodating Apple devices and apps, and they did. Soon, an entire ecosystem of third-party tools and services sprang up to help enterprise IT professionals manage iDevices, support them, develop apps for them, and deliver back-end enterprise data and applications securely to employees. Apple helped primarily by getting out of the way. That evolution began four years ago, shortly after the introduction of the iPad. Apple supported these activities with its iOS Developer Enterprise Program, which allowed corporations to develop apps for their own institutional use and not have to publish them in the Apple App Store.

Now, IBM has made a dramatic entrance into this ecosystem—with four offerings specifically targeted for their many enterprise accounts: IBM MobileFirst for iOS, IBM MobileFirst Platforms for iOS, AppleCare for Enterprise, and MobileFirst supply and management. The first two offerings are targeted for application developers and are iOS-specific instantiations of IBM’s MobileFirst offerings, which we described in IBM’s MobileFirst “Customer Cloud” Strategy, in late March. Essentially, this is a cloud-based development platform that is designed to help enterprise app developers develop, deploy, secure, and integrate corporate apps into their (IBM and other ERP) back-end systems and services. IBM has developed 100+ starter kit apps for over 10 vertical industries.

Enterprise Customers Forged the IBM & Apple Customer Ecosystem

What I like about the new alliance between IBM and Apple for secure mobile apps is that it’s customer-driven. This is a great example of a customer ecosystem. IBM has historically been pretty good at recognizing and acknowledging their customers’ behaviors and either acquiring, or making strong alliances with, the suppliers that IBM customers favor. I often refer to this behavior as “running around in front of the customer parade.” A true customer ecosystem is not a marketing alliance that is ginned up by CEOs and marketing execs; it is a business network that is organically generated by customers’ behaviors as they go about their business of getting things done.

IBM’s business customers, starting with corporate CEOs and CIOs, gravitated to Apple iPads almost immediately. One of our clients—the CIO of a financial services firm—reported several years ago that he was pleasantly surprised that every single member of the CIO round table he participated in was taking notes on his/her iPad. In the past, corporate CIOs were often the last to adopt new technology. Most were slow to start using PCs in the 1980s, considering them “toys.” But iPads caught on quickly because CEOs, high-powered financial traders, and top salespeople—the folks who drive a company’s strategy and bring in the big bucks—began using iPads. That meant that CIOs quickly needed to ensure the security of the information and apps these top execs were using—both for work and for personal use.

So, the IBM/Apple alliance around mobile apps is a great victory for enterprise customers. They voted with their feet. Their suppliers (Apple and IBM) responded by forming an alliance to formalize the ecosystem that was already taking shape.

Can IBM Deliver Customer Clouds?

We all walk around with the cloud in our pockets. Our mobile devices are our connection to the cloud. Computing resources, networking resources, storage, content, applications, and even business processes now run using cloud computing. That means that the actual data we’re accessing is sitting on one or more secure database arrays in one or more locations somewhere in the world. The computers whose cycles we’re accessing are spinning up and down in various server farms somewhere in the world. We don’t care where. We don’t need to care where. Except that, if the data we’re accessing includes personally identifiable information, we DO care. That’s information that we don’t want to cross borders. That’s information we want to know is encrypted. That’s information that we don’t want bad guys to steal or government spies to tap into.

So, the location(s) in which customer data resides does matter. But that doesn’t mean companies should eschew the use of cloud computing for their customer information. In fact, customers’ information is among the first information that belongs in the cloud because customers want access to their information 24x7 from anywhere in the world and from any device. Customers want their information and customer-impacting business process to be synchronized across all the devices they may use to complete actions and to monitor activity status.

Customer Clouds: The Next Big IT Battleground

“Best of” Customer Cloud Articles

We’ve been writing a lot recently about “Customer Clouds.” It’s a term we coined. And it’s a movement we’re fully behind. Most of you rely on us for thought leadership around customer-impacting technology trends. This time, we may be WAY out in front of the parade. But we don’t think so. What’s a “Customer Cloud”? It’s the on-demand computing and networking infrastructure that enables your customers to securely manage their information, their assets, their events, their stuff, and their projects from their mobile devices and/or from their computers.

To catch you up, here are our three best articles on Customer Clouds:

• What's Your Customer Cloud Strategy? Twelve Customer Requirements to Include as Your Firm Migrates to Cloud Computing

• Cloud Computing in 2015: End-Customers’ Priorities Will Drive Companies’ Customer Cloud Implementations

• Priorities for Microsoft’s New CEO: Focus on Cross-Platform Mobile Application Development & Customer Clouds

Mobile = Customer Clouds in Your Pocket

The fact is that mobile application development is driving most companies’ customer, brand, marketing, and IT strategies these days. Mobile and Cloud go together. They need each other. Mobile apps need secure access to customer data from anywhere. Clouds are a good way to provide that ubiquity. They aggregate customer data and keep customers’ information synchronized across all their devices.

Sun Cloud & Oracle Cloud to Combine

Sun has found a home, with Oracle. My conjecture is that the Sun Board of Directors felt that an IBM/Sun merger was likely to face costly delays to gain regulatory approvals. Anti-Trust concerns that a merger of two of the world's largest hardware and services suppliers would reduce healthy competition would have made approval in the EU and the US problematic. Sun was losing value too fast to withstand a long regulatory battle. So the Board eschewed IBM as its sole suitor and encouraged the embrace of Oracle.

I don't believe that Oracle has ever sold hardware. So this is a merger of a hardware/engineering firm with strong engineering-style software and services with a business software firm. Both companies have cloud computing in common as the vector for their present and future strategies, so the Sun/Oracle cloud makes as much sense (maybe more?) than the IBM/Sun cloud. Many of Oracle's largest customers already run their server farms on Sun hardware with Solaris or Linux as the O/S and middleware layers and Oracle's database and applications at the software and applications layer.

Both Sun and Oracle have been aggressively moving into Cloud Computing. In fact, I remember hearing the most cogent "outsourcing" argument from one of Sun's top executives about four years ago. The picture he painted was seductive because he talked about something that most SaaS vendors don't discuss. He talked about using the patterns of customers' continuous improvements to inform the future development of Oracle's applications and middleware. If all of your Oracle applications are running in Oracle's cloud, and your firm customizes or adds capabilities to your own applications, that is your proprietary value-add, that is available just to you. But, Oracle, as the SaaS provider will "see" all of the improvements and work arounds made by all of its customers and will be able to detect patterns in these changes, and add those needed capabilities into the base application code. This was a good example of customer-led innovation. I was quite impressed.

There is one main incompatibility that I see between the Sun and Oracle cultures and brand. It's not so much a hardware culture vs. a software culture. It's a predatory sales culture vs. a respectful sales culture. Smart customers--software engineers and architects--LIKE dealing with Sun. Sun's sales people are highly technical. They speak the same language as their customers. They respect and admire their customers' talents. Oracle's customers are the CIOs and Aministrative Officers. They are used to being abused by Oracle's salespeople who are constantly extracting high rents and are hard negotiatiors. Many times, clients have told me how much they hate dealing with Oracle.

Will customers accept the combined brand experience? Time will tell.

IBM and Sun Agreeing to a Lower Price--But the Deal's On!

This just in from the Wall Street Journal:

"IBM has cut its takeover bid for Sun Microsystems to between $9 and $10 a share. Sun has agreed to a lower price in return for commitments from IBM that it will stick with the deal in the event of intense regulatory scrutiny."

I figured when Sun began doing major lay-offs that was also part of the deal they struck. IBM probably didn't want to inherit a bunch of people they would immediately need to lay-off. This deal is probably the best that can be expected during these gloomy times. The good news for customers is that their investments in Sun technology will be protected.

I still believe that this deal has been triggered by the sudden appetite for Cloud Computing.

MICROSOFT (ORACLE) AND LINUX

We rarely write about Microsoft any more. Compared to Google, Microsoft has less and less effect on the business strategies of our corporate clients. Yet in the past two weeks, there has been a major sea change afoot that warrants commentary. Microsoft has apparently stopped seeing Linux as the enemy and realized that it’s time to co-opt Linux.

Linux is winning on the server. There’s no question about the fact that customers large and small want to mix and match Linux and MS boxes. Trying to fight against that customer tide wasn’t working. So Microsoft made peace with Novell (along with an infusion of $442 million) and is now promoting SUSE Linux and MS/Linux interoperability. Add to that news the fact that Oracle is now offering cut-rate prices for support of Red Hat’s Linux, and you have a major seismic shift afoot.

The Linux community is worried about fragmentation of Linux--two many variants promoted by too many strong parties. I don’t think these latest industry machinations are about fragmentation. I think they’re more about capitulation. Linux on the server is big business. It’s a business that Intel, Dell, HP, IBM, and Sun still hold dear. It’s a business that Microsoft can’t afford to lose to Oracle, Linux, Google, et al.

A PEEK INTO THE FUTURE OF COMPUTING

What “Grand Challenge Problems” Will We Be Able to Solve with the Next-Gen Computing Platforms?

Our lead users work on really hard and interesting problems. At our Pioneers meeting in early October, Tom Morgan gave us a glimpse into the project he has been involved with--helping with the design of the Cyclops/C64 computer chips in a research project that is a collaboration between IBM Research, The University of Delaware, and the Institute for Mathematics and Advanced Super Computing, at Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, New York.

Tom is currently working there on his doctorate in mathematics. The IBM architect is Monty Denneau. For those of you who have followed trends in scientific computing, the Cyclops architecture is an alternative approach to the one being taken in the more highly publicized “blue gene” project. In a paper entitled, “Evaluation of a Multithreaded Architecture for Cellular Computing,”

GOOGLE: THE CAMEL’S NOSE IN BUSINESS SOFTWARE?

Our search and findability guru, Sue Aldrich, characterized Google’s latest enterprise software additions as the camel’s nose strategy. First, Google offered search appliances for the enterprise and the desktop to make it easy for employees to “Google” the information within their companies the way they use Google to find external resources. Then, Google offered consumer email, which many business people quickly adopted as an alternative personal email service. Now, Google is providing “Google Apps for Your Domain” which offers good-quality email with integrated calendaring, chat, VOIP and other features that will appeal to small businesses and to end users within large enterprises as well. Google Earth for the enterprise is picking up traction as more and more companies use the app for strategic applications from construction to oil exploration to logistics to environmental applications.