IBM's sweeping initiative to address major shift in world's data flow - UPDATED

Tony Austin
Tuesday, 09 September 2008 11:00

Opinion and Analysis

IBM today announced its largest launch ever of new storage hardware, software and services that are the building blocks for the world’s strongest information infrastructure portfolio, with the aim of enabling clients to tackle information challenges and move data from institutions to individuals and “clouds.”

September 08, 2008: The new offerings, IBM says, are designed to enable businesses, governments and other institutions to transform static data managed in silos into more dynamic information that is accessible by individuals wherever they go in a cloud computing environment.

As consumers now look to ”take their information” with them - improving their healthcare, security, entertainment, social life and consumer experience anytime, around the globe, in real time – businesses are struggling with outdated data centers, which are unable to handle the increased information management demands.  

The proliferation of the mobile web, connected sensors everywhere, from cars to pipelines, online medical records, and the explosive growth of Web 2.0 data and social networking, are leading to 16-fold growth in each individual’s “information footprint” by 2020, according to IBM. Infrastructures need to adapt today to meet this demand.

In response, IBM today delivered critical elements for an information infrastructure as part of its New Enterprise Data Center strategy. These elements focus on the availability, compliance and retention, and security pain points for clients as they re-design their data centers.

More than 30 new and upgraded products and services are being introduced across the IBM portfolio to meet these critical needs.

Such is the scope of today's IBM announcements that I've given myself a headache trying to absorb and understand the massive amount of IBM  material. What follows is the shortest of summaries of the main points!

To complement this report, I hope to have a podcast with an IBM executive available for you in the next day or so.

UPDATE: the podcast is now available from here.
 

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