The decline in performance, cloud services are really killing IBM?

Forbes popular columnist Eric Jackson issued a commentary a few days ago the headline is "Decline in performance," cloud services is really killing IBM, according to IBM's earnings, the company not only the overall performance of the flat, but also in China, Russia, such as the previous growth market has shown the same weakness, Accordingly, he argues that the question should be carefully assessed: whether IBM missed the big ship from the huge information technology spending cloud service spending.

In this review, I am not going to discuss this question directly, but hoping to provide an insight into the problem, IBM has spent the last two years trying to preach big data-most of which IBM has been talking about in the past few years-which has shifted its focus to big data for two years, and the company seems to think that cloud computing is the foundation Large data is the core of the next application of information technology.

March, Hu Shizhong, IBM Global vice president and general manager of Greater China Software group, IBM Software group Greater China Strategy and marketing director Wu Lidong had an exchange, talk about the focus can be summed up around the big Data 5 why, not only including large data as a hot industry itself, the opportunity to birth, IBM's Big Data strategy, it also includes some of the profound implications of big data, such as whether companies should transfer transactions now implemented on Third-party platforms to their own portals, or whether they will be subject to islands of data, which may reveal what IBM is thinking and doing in the cloud service era.

One: Big data is not a bubble?

At present many so-called big data entrepreneurs, it seems to be doing some analysis of the information about social networks such as microblogs, and then helping to boost sales, but obviously that's not all, and software and hardware companies like IBM seem to be the biggest beneficiaries, and I'm even beginning to wonder if the concept was invented by software and hardware giants to sell more products.

Hu Shizhong agreed that IBM would be one of the biggest beneficiaries. However, he also believes that small companies in a number of niche areas will also have many opportunities, such as how to create a different type of data analysis, analysis, and some of them will get independent living space, but many may be acquired.

"In the past 18 months, there have been more foreign companies than I expected to come to China, some of which are specialized in data logging, sources of data, and so on." Here, every obstacle is an opportunity. ”

But the industry is dealing with rapidly changing objects, such as mobile data, and perhaps customers are more willing to deal with corporate solutions such as IBM, the biggest risk for small companies--they may be dumped by the tide with a slight carelessness. IBM will play the role of acquirer in many areas and has acquired more than 30 companies with big data in the past.

IBM in this respect the first acquisition of Cognos, is to do the general analytical type. Now turn to the acquisition of professional, solve large data domain specific problems of the company, or to solve the industry problems, or else the classification of data, or some data storage technology problems, or data mining, more and more narrow, more and more refined.

"This allows us to provide our customers with more types of solutions to our problems, rather than using the same thing to solve all the problems." ”

Second: The enterprise will eventually flee the third party electric business platform, back to their own portal?

Taobao last year's turnover has exceeded 1 trillion yuan, the industry's high growth is still continuing, when large data become a big problem, whether the enterprise needs to relocate its electrical business model? According to two interviews, they have the message that some foreign companies have started to withdraw their trading links from the Amazon, and turn to their own portals because they are unwilling to lose customers ' first-hand information and customer relationships.

And IBM is clearly trying to make Chinese companies aware of this, because they will need the support of a solution provider like IBM, which is a big deal.

"We're talking about smart business with every business, began to introduce them to put this thing on a third party platform, put on Taobao cat's price is what, you do not know who bought things, do not know what his hobby is, there is no way to let people know what your product is. In addition, the product you are designing is not necessarily what the customer wants, which will result in inventory. ”

Three: third-party data operations is a big deal?

SAP is trying to encourage companies to put their data on a public platform, this gives you the advantage of the data-because each company has the opportunity to build up the advantage of large data when it shares its own data, which is an island of data when it is just a private property of every business.

Will IBM do the same? Hu Shizhong's answer is: first, in the country has not heard of this demand, not met; second, if the customer has this demand, IBM can do this. However, in foreign countries, IBM has begun to provide enterprises with large data operations services to help them apply data.

"But not at home, because many companies have a lot of their own low-cost IT staff, but also need to put these people's energy to play as far as possible." ”

Four: Will big data make the boundaries of the industry more blurred?

The boundaries between one industry and another industry are largely due to the boundaries of knowledge and technology, and large numbers are blurring the boundaries, such as the fact that some logistics companies are intervening in the field of electricity, and Alibaba is also a strong competitor in the financial sector.

This trend is also happening in IBM, Ogilvy, for example, is a traditional IBM PR company, paying it a fee each year, but now becomes IBM's partner in the EMM (Enterprise Marketing Management), while its traditional customer Su Ning is likely to become IBM's next generation product partner or its channel partner.

Five: Large data islands will appear?

Social networks and electricity-trading platforms, which have a lot of critical data, have classified data as private property, hoping to make it the winner of Big data, which could lead to new islands of information.

The two people think that on the one hand, Facebook and Twitter have taken the lead in opening up some of the data to third parties, because they can benefit from this openness themselves, they can't do all their analysis and use, and more companies will eventually go that way, but their openness won't be free, They will want to benefit from openness.

On the other hand, while external data such as microblogs and micro-letters are important sources of data, most customers already have enough internal data to start with in-house data applications, and they need to develop a unified manager to coordinate the actions of various departments.