WebSphere Strategy #ibmimpact

In the analyst track we got an update on WebSphere. Marie Wieck kicked off with a quick overview of the WebSphere business and on the persistent themes, largely the same as the ones highlighted in the opening keynote (open, mobile) but also emphasizing IBM’s increased outreach to and support of developers, its focus on improving collaboration between business and IT and its investment in the delivery of patterns and expertise-based systems like PureSystems as well as its industry focus. She handed over to Jerry Cuomo, CTO of WebSphere.

Jerry began by talking about the inspiration he gets from the way mobile is reinventing everything from finding a cab, buying products, checking in for a flight, reporting a car accident and more. This power of mobile to reinvent processes and organizations is driving IBM’s investments in WebSphere so that it becomes the platform for this transformation. He sees differences between these new systems and established systems of record:

• Systems of interaction, he says, bring context by exposing more of the motivation and mindset of customers and application users.
• They also extend the “transaction” or interaction scope beyond the core to preliminaries and follow-ups.
• Social and behavior data drives insight and this can be used to drive analytically driven interactions or recommendations
• Cross-channel, multi-channel, that includes mobile develops a 360 relationship and experience

The basis for the new capabilities is to allow developers to detect, enrich, perceive and act:

• Detect opportunities to engage
• Enrich with historical and external data
• Perceive interactions across time and locations
• Act on the insight generated

IBM he said is extending its OpenCloud architecture (designed to support private, public and hybrid clouds) to include software-defined environments based on standards like OASIS Tosca as well as composition and business application layers based on open standards. IBM has an increasing array of tools to integrate open technologies with IBM products to support this while  adding new Mobile, Process, Decision, Application Foundation capabilities to the composition layer. With that Jerry handed over to others for specific sections.