IBM the Next Great Software Company?

Diomidis Spinellis writes "A report in this week's Economist discusses IBM's globalization strategy and the company's presence in India. Refreshingly, the article admits that there's more to outsourcing than cheap labor, contrasting IBM's calculated investments with Apple's rapid pull-out from Bangalore. Although the jury is still out on how sluggish multinationals can compete with vigorous tigers, it seems that IBM has a credible strategy for becoming the next great software company, and that outsourcing is only a part of the puzzle."

Comments

IBM is in the computer business now?

[stratjakt]

What a retarded article. They were (and still are) the first great software company.

I remember cheering Microsoft for toppling their monopoly.

Re:IBM is in the computer business now?

[darjen]

IBM is a great hardware company. It has never been known for great software. Ask anybody who has had to use JCL. The inventors of IEFBR14 could never be known as a great software company.

Ever hear of their Webphere Commerce suite of products? There are large companies all over the place that are built on it. My employer consults with and builds web sites for many of them. In fact I'd say their software is more solid than anything from Oracle or Sun. These last few months I have been building an internal application based on Oracle's technology/middleware stack and let me tell you, it is flaky as hell. I guess there's a reason most of my company uses Websphere Commerce to build enterprise applications...

Re:IBM is in the computer business now?

[Anonymous Coward]

IMHO, Grover Cleveland was never more than a second rate software company.

MMmmm, nope

[Colin Smith]

The textbook case would, of course, be Lotus Domino/Notes. Which is more expensive per-seat than Outlook/Exchange Sorry, Notes isn't just an email/groupware client/server like Exchange. It's a distributed application and database platform. And yes, it takes more work than your typical MS certified whatever can handle. Many of them don't even understand the benefits of the system. Set up and developed by a competent team, Notes can transform the way business processes work.

IBM from the Inside

[Hypharse]

I have been working in IBM Research for the last year and have witnessed a lot of the bad and a lot of the good I heard about IBM while outside it. I have witnessed the shift in IBM to Software and Services. One person in my group is from India and he talks occasionally about the plants IBM opens there employing like 50,000 people in one plant. They are nearly all entry level and the turnover rate is high due to their bad education systems. About IBM, the bad and the good that I have witnessed. The Bad: There are plenty of clueless people in charge making the decisions for everyone else. There are plenty of brilliant people working in IBM, but they are put on the same level and sometimes even a lower level than others. Many phds are not allowed to actually do their research, but instead are used to try and create ways to keep existing, flawed, processes going. They are also pushing many people into the "Services" side and they occasionally treat people who are not part of that "next big thing" like crap. When I started the group I am in had 6 very smart phds from premier programs in their field. We lost one to retirement and IBM would not allow for a replacement. Another was forced into the "Services" end but instead just quit and is working for another company. Now we are down to 4 and the others who have been there a lot longer than I have are very frustrated at IBM basically telling them they are not important because they are not part of this "next big wave". The Good: If you are lucky enough to get in the right groups that have money IBM is a great place to research ideas. Also, IBM has made many advances that are not talked about widely so that one post about IBM only getting a couple things right and pushing them to the extreme is bogus. IBM issues more patents per year than most countries and they generate billions from those patents. I was told (don't know if it is for sure a fact) that IBM makes more money from the PS3 and from the XBOX360 than Microsoft or Sony. You hear about IBM being involved with the PS3 because of the cell processor, but most people would be surprised to hear that IBM did a lot of the work for the XBOX360 as well.

Re:IBM's Strategy

[morzel]

Chances are you're just a rabid anti-Notes troll, but I'll bite anyway.

Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange are different products: the first is a "groupware" platform that happens to do mail, the other is a mail server that might be linked to some other Microsoft platforms (notably: sharepoint). The Notes client can be used for accessing "databases" (which are actually a container with semi-structured data and application logic in one), for which IBM provides a "mail database" that is kinda capable of handling mail. Outlook is a superb mail client that does nothing else unless you've got someone willing to create "outlook foms" that link to other MS technologies.

The good about Domino/Notes:

• Domino is multiplatform, Notes kinda (current Linux client is barely usable)
• Security is a design fundamental in Notes/Domino. Notes has been doing private key crypto and signed code before Exchange was even conceived.
• Domino/Notes is way better when integration company processes/workflows in your mail environment.
• Restoring backed up mails/documents/databases can be done relatively easy, and has been like that for at least 12 years.

The bad:

• The Notes UI is infamous because it is so different from Windows and counter-intuitive to some people. This is for the major part historical (i.e.: Notes has been developed as a multiplatform client, and it includes a lot of legacy). If you want you can easily update the design of your mail database and replace it with an open source one (try that with Outlook ;-) -- see openntf.org for that. If you really want, you can just use outlook with Lotus Domino natively with the DAMO plugin.
• The learning curve for Domino administration is steeper than that of MS Exchange. The impact of a good administrator versus a not-so-good one will be much more visible in a Domino environment than in an Exchange/outlook environment. Getting both to go further than a couple of machines requires good admins regardless of the technology

The actual cost per user won't differ that much between either platform, and the featureset is different. If you're a Microsoft shop and have an all-windows datacenter, SQL Server, Sharepoint portal and whatnot you'll be installing Exchange. If you're not already linked as much to Microsoft technologies chances are that Domino/Notes is a better choice. If you're sensitive regarding security (or having to abide to certain security regulations), Domino/Notes is probably your best shot (a lot of banks think so, anyway).

So, it's not a black and white issue, and there are very good reasons why Notes and Domino can be a better choice for a particular situation.

Disclaimer: I know a thing or two about IBM/Lotus technologies (and of Microsoft and Linux, so don't hold that against me ;-)

Re:Software company?

[edward350z]

No, you probably don't use any IBM software on your *PeeCee*. However, your company's accounting department probably uses an IBM mainframe running CICS. That airline ticket you booked on Orbitz went through IBM WebSphere to an IBM MQSeries server to IBM DB2, etc. If you drive a Honda/Acura automobile with voice-activated navigation, that's IBM ViaVoice. If you use Linux, a good chunk of the recent kernel patches were developed by folks on IBM's payroll. IBM is like Tyco or 3M -- they're involved in EVERYTHING you touch even if you don't see their branding front and center. Anyone who thinks IBM isn't a software company clearly does not have a big picture view of the IT world.