UPDATED 18:36 EDT / MAY 21 2014

IBM’s storage vision rising from the ashes | #IBMEdge

Final Wrap - IBM Edge 2014 - theCUBELike so many other technological innovations throughout the 20th century, the disk drive was too invented by IBM.  But the company had seen its technical dominance of the storage space erode over the years due to a combination of internal and external factors that shifted the strategic focus to areas deemed more important by management. In 2007, Bill Zeitler, the then head of Big Blue’s Systems and Technology business, summarized the situation as follows:

“He said: ‘R&D is growing at 9 percent and the business is growing at 6 percent, something’s gotta give.’ And what gave was R&D in storage, IBM pulled back on its storage R&D,” Wikibon chief scientist Dave Vellante, to whom Zeitler addressed his remark, reflected on theCUBE in the wrap-up segment for the vendor’s Edge 2014 storage conference this week in Las Vegas. He sees the summit as a historical milestone for the company, which introduced a slew of new systems that represent the first fruits of its renewed investment in data storage.

“Just like we saw during HP’s ‘hurt days’, when HP pulled back on R&D it wasn’t able to just flick a switch and turn on the R&D machine. So it’s taken a long time for IBM to get back into its groove swing,” Vellante tells co-host John Furrier. He adds that Edge has evolved unrecognizably since theCUBE began its coverage of the event a few years ago, which mirrors the gradual transformation of the company’s solutions portfolio from a collection of disparate products to what he calls a more “cogent story”. The still ongoing effort runs in parallel with similarly momentous changes in IBM’s analytics and cloud strategies, which are also beginning to take shape as a result of numerous organic advancements and milestone acquisitions like SoftLayer over the last 18 months.

The channel is an equally important piece of the puzzle. The new products introduced at this week’s conference come as a welcome boost for the ecosystem, although Vellante believes Big Blue could do more to engage storage partners and drive the kind of value-add deals the likes of SAP and Oracle are pushing. But overall, the company is on the right track.  Chief executive Virginia Rometty is successfully executing the vision Furrier first outlined at Edge 2012.

“You could take a little bit of Tivoli, take a little bit of that, take a little bit of this and just bring it together in a new restaurant of value where you can cook up a new meal for the modern era,” he reiterates. “They’ve done that.” And company is making big gains on the business side as well .

Vellante highlights that IBM’s January sale of its low-end storage business to Lenovo for $2.3 million was not only sound from a long-term perspective, but also particularly well timed. By signing the deal in the first quarter, the company gave partners and customers as much breathing room as they could hope for to sort out relations.

The landmark transaction underscored Big Blue’s push to refocus its energy to put together a value proposition based on Server SAN, a term coined by Wikibon to describe next generation storage architectures that decouple capacity from the underlying infrastructure to simplify management and drive operational efficiencies.  Big Blue has recognized the  tremendous opportunity in this emerging trend and is now actively pursuing it. “IBM’s response to the whole software-defined theme is not me-too,” Vellante observes.

The company is taking full advantage of its existing strengths in its storage strategy, he elaborates, combining the capabilities of Watson with its widely-used SAN Volume Controller and other core solutions to put together a value proposition that goes above and beyond merely abstracting away hardware details. Meanwhile, IBM is also leveraging its long history in the open source community to capitalize on OpenStack, most recently rolling out a pre-packaged distribution of the platform to its newly launched cloud marketplace.  All of that is part of a calculated effort to navigate the turbulent waters of the current enterprise marketplace amidst the perfect storm of innovation sweeping through the industry.

“You don’t just pivot when you’re a company the size of IBM, you slowly turn the battleship and that’s what IBM is doing,” Vellante summarizes. “They identify the markets – cloud, mobile, Big Data – they see the opportunities and they started making investments and those investments will pay off.”


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