At the IBM PartnerWorld Leadership Conference here in Las Vegas, it was great networking with the IBM PureSystems Business Partners at the PureSystems reception at the PURE night club last night. Yes, the Pure and PURE wordplay was intentional. 
After talking hardcore IT for quite awhile, we eventually transitioned to a little bit of fun and boogie.
PureSystems is a perfect fit for Growth Markets
For today’s blog, I’m going to start with what I did last today because it really encapsulated the theme around PureSystems for most of the day. I attended the IBM Growth Markets Geography Forum where Luca Chiarito, IBM Vice President of Business Partner Organization for Growth Markets (what IBM often calls GMU) spoke. Luca opened his talk on how specific regions around the world are experiencing an explosion in growth and that, as this growth happens, over 1 billion people will be joining a different class and opportunity for income. Major changes in demographics create other major shifts in other ways such as airports, traffic, energy, information technology, and more. A key goal IBM has, along with its partners, is to bring value in this midst of this change–to help in the creation of a Smarter Planet through technology innovation.
IBM research shows that the strongest areas of change and need for IT in the growth markets is around Cloud Computing, Mobile, Social Business, and Big Data and Analytics. Luca shines the spotlight on a key solution that is a ready fit to help with this mission–IBM PureSystems, commenting that the PureSystems technology itself caters to the needs the growth markets are experiencing with a Cloud ready solution that provides:
- Solutions for a new era of cognitive computing
- Data analytics for real-time insight
- An integrated, secure platform
Advent One wins first PureSystems Business Partner Award
Today in the PWLC general sessions, PureSystems achieved yet another milestone. IBM announced the first ever IBM Beacon Award winner–Advent One–for the new PureSystems category–Outstanding Expert Integrated Systems solution. Advent One built a solution around the PureFlex System for a global manufacturing firm based in Australia–a growth market for IBM. The solution is an excellent example of how an integrated system can signficantly lower the client’s infrastructure and system management costs, while improving overall performance and speeding application deployment. Demonstrating the benefits of PureSystems–integrated by design, built-in expertise, and simplified experience–the Advent One solution consolidated both Intel and POWER workloads onto a single PureFlex System. Their solution is highly repeatable solution and complemented by partner-provided migration and consolidation services. Congratulations, Advent One!
PureSystems LeaderShip Exchange Sessions on Cloud, Big Data, and Analytics
After the general sessions, I spent the second half of the day in two PureSystems Leadership Exchange Sessions:
- 2 pm: PureSystems: Delivering Cloud Application, Big Data, and Analytics Platform Services–Jason Gartner, Vice President of IBM PureSystems Product Management and Rado Nikolov, Director of IBM Pure Data Product Management
- 3 pm: PureSystems: Delivering Cloud Infrastructure Services for the Enterprise and MSP–Andy Monshaw, General Manager of IBM PureFlex, and John Shedlesky, IBM Vice President of Competitive Technology
The first exchange session covered some of the recent PureApplication and PureData announcements announcements released earlier this month.
Jason discussed how PureApplication has really revolutioned the application platform services space with reduced time, cost, and risk where partners and customers now talk about deploying a multi-tiered application in minutes as opposed to weeks.
He explained why we should care about the move to Expert Integrated Systems:
- Explosive growth for Industry specific PaaS offering
- 60% of all new IT spend influenced by LOB executives
- Patterns differentiates your offerings through added value, rapid time to market and unparallel cost saving
He covered the PureSystems family investment and momentum in which PureFlex and PureApplication were released in Q2 2012; PureData in Q4 2013, and then Cloud and Big Data and Analytics offerings on February 5, 2013. He provided some quick facts:
- +2300: PureSystems systems shipped in more than 70 countries in less than 7 months
- 320 optimized solutions from 275 leading partners
- 90+ MSP footprints
- 80+: References & case studies demonstrating success
- 1400+: Requests for PureSystems trials through the cloud
- 1300+ Authorized PureSystems resellers
Taking a deep dive on the recent February announcements, Jason explained how PureApplication is a built-for-cloud platform system simplifying lifecycle deployment and management of applications with two new releases:
1. Smaller “mini” entry point
- 30% reduction in power consumption
- Up to 60% better price/performance running typical web and DB
- applications (over a competitor’s configuration)
- Same built-in expertise & simplified experience as larger configurations
2. POWER model
- Increased Performance, Density, and Resiliency
- Automatic throughput improvements for data intensive applications with tiered storage and smart data placement
- Up to 90% reduction in vulnerabilities – saving time and money5
He touched on how IBM uses common patterns technology: IBM SmartCloud Foundation for private cloud, PureApplication for application deployment, and IBM SmartCloud Services for moving to a public cloud.
He also shared how IBM is committed to optimizing IBM Software with “Patterns of Expertise” covering a
breadth of industries such as financial markets, insurance, healthcare, retail and government through PureSystems Centre. Some of these patterns include:
- Data management
- Busienss analytics and data warehousing
- Information integration and governance
- Application infrastructure (Mixed Language Application Moderization)
- Connectivity, integration, and SOA (DataPower)
- Mobile development and connectivity (IBM Mobile Application Platform)
- Social Collaboration
- Asset and Facilities Management (Maximo Asset Management)
- Business Process Management
Jason concluded with identifying key sales opportunities for PureApplication System:
- Projects that involve a specific workload which would benefit from the expertise, repeatability and rapid deployments that patterns provide eg: ISVs, Mobile, BI, Cognos, Portal, BPM
- Consolidate existing Application Server deployments (IBM & 3rd party) to drive efficiencies, and migrate to the latest app server versions
- Investments in building out next-generation IT model, based on cloud principles
- Hosting of custom or ISV applications or the system itself
Then Rado discussed how big data challenges in the areas of velocity, volume, variety, and veracity are increasing the demand on data systems and introduced the three models of PureData, which are workload optimized for high performance, high availability, high scalability and have the following features:
Rado explained how different applications rely on different data processing and different data workloads require different solutions; thus PureData offers three models of PureData:
- PureData for Transactions–Scalable transactional database for solutions such as e-commerce
- PureData for Analytics–Analytics data warehouse for solutions such as customer analysis
- PureData for Operational Analytics–Operational data warehouse for solutions such as real-time fraud detection
The second exchange session took a deeper dive on much of the material Steve Mills discussed in PWLC day 2 general session. See my blog for a recap on of the Steve Mills talk on PureFlex. Andy discussed how the PureFlex infrastructure demonstrates leadership in technology, integration, software, and services and provides more for your money with:
- Tell the story
- Know the opportunities
- Sell with confidence
- Skill up
See below for some pictures of both exchange sessions.
And now, this time, I am off to hear the Grammy Award winning Train in concert tonight–one of the perks of attending the IBM PartnerWorld Leadership conference.
Related blog entries:
- Expert Integrated Systems at IBM PartnerWorld Leadership Conference 2013
- PureSystems Live from the IBM PWLC 2013
- PureSystems market opportunity for IBM Business Partners: Recap of Day 1 at PWLC 2013
- Steve Mills encourages IBM Business Partners to leverage IBM PureSystems: Recap of Day 2 at PWLC 2013
~By Tiffany Winman
Twitter: @TiffanyWinman
