April 6th, 2005
IBM: Vendors who fail to adapt to open source may not be around in 2010
Speaking at the Open Source Business Conference today, IBM vice president of technology and strategy for servers Irving Wladawsky-Berger talked about how open standards, grid enablement, SOA, autonomic computing, continuous business process optimization and information integration are keys to solving the complexity problem in IT. It’s basically IBM’s business strategy–leveraging open standards, component architectures, its R&D investments, as well as open source community efforts, in autonomics, grid computing and virtualized services to provide end-to-end IT consulting and product services.
As evidence of how far the IBM of old has come, he described desktop and laptops as legacy systems. "The laptop and desktop are now a legacy, as mainframe is in the server world. All things are becoming IT enabled, with 32- or 64-bit processors running OSs like Linux and software stacks. The implications are enormous–medical equipment, automobiles, and tracking packages with RFID are all part of the world of IT."
In addressing the open source phenomenon and innovation, Wladawksy-Berger said that it is changing the culture of every business, and alleged that businesses that fail to adapt won’t be around five years from now. "The problems facing us are of such magnitude and are far bigger than any one company. One of the most interesting revolutions in businesses is how to bring together the best and brightest to collaborate."
That collaboration means working with the open source community and finding a balance between proprietary and open source software. "If you want to tap into the energy of communities, you need to balance a proprietary approach to intellectual property with a more collaborative approach, having people work with the communities and donate some intellectual property to communities and build proprietary offerings on top of open source platforms," Wladawsky-Berger said. He also cited massive changes in public policy with regard to intellectual property rights. "No one country has the ability to say ’screw you’ to anybody. The R&D will follow where the people are. It will keep everybody on their best behavior or force them to go elsewhere, where the conditions are better."
IBM has been the most aggressive of the big companies turning open source development into an asset, and a competitive weapon against Microsoft and Sun. Wladawksy-Berger called it "luck" that open source appeared on the scene, but it hasn’t been lucky how IBM has played the open source community to its advantage.
While open source development solves accelerates innovation, Wladawsky-Berger noted that the tools for building business solutions–on closed or open platforms–are still too primitive. "Look at progress in chip design and fabrication because of the tools. Look at progress in designing and building airplanes and cars because of CAD/CAM tools. Look at how primitive building business solutions is compared to those more mature areas. Our tools are not quite there," he said. "One of most exciting things upon us is to usher a real business process revolution–it will be less like an art and more like an engineering discipline in how we design, build and deploy."
Wladawsky-Berger was followed by Edward Screven, chief corporate architect at Oracle, who said that the development process–closed or open source–is irrelevant to the data center. "Open standards are more important than open source. It allows customers to build integrated tech stacks from multiple vendors," Screven said. “"The only issue is, does it help." He said the commercial vendors don’t view themselves at war with open source, and that closed source vendors play an increasingly important role in bringing open source to the data center. I would add that is only true until open source software encroaches on the revenues of Oracle or any other company providing proprietary solutions. If you are Sun or Microsoft, Linux is not your best friend. Today, MySQL and other open source databases aren’t impinging on the data center, but down the road that may change and require Oracle to rethink how it extracts value from customers.
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
