Company: IBMEntry: IBM/Brocade/JuniperMorning Line: 3 to 1Tip sheet: Will try to ride strong service component to the winner's circle
Ask IBM about the next-generation data center and company officials will begin talking about the dynamic infrastructure, and describing how that is forever expanding outward as enterprises embrace mobility and increase the numbers and types of devices in use.
IBM is pulling together the server, storage and networking resources needed to support this expanding infrastructure, then topping that off with software for managing the environment. Virtualization across the entire infrastructure, meaning all classes of servers, storage, networking and applications, is a critically important enabling technology, and energy management an underpinning as well, describes Pete McCaffrey, director in IBM System and Technology Group.
If that doesn't sound so different from what Cisco and HP have planned that's because it isn't. But IBM does talk up its services capabilities more than the others. For example, McCaffrey touts the recently introduced IBM Service Management Industry Solutions, which pull together various service management services and software from IBM and its partners, to help organizations centrally manage their expanding infrastructures. He also pitches a new networking service aimed at helping enterprises with consolidation and virtualization.
"Our clients aren't only looking for technologies. They're also coming to us and saying, 'How do I move forward?'" McCaffrey says.
Some of IBM's more intriguing moves are networking-related, industry watchers say.
Although IBM officially says it is not backing away from Cisco as a strategic partner, the company has decided to put its label on and resell Ethernet gear from Brocade, and it is collaborating with Juniper Networks on hybrid public-private cloud capabilities.
That IBM is rebranding the Brocade switches and routers is telling about how frayed the Cisco relationship may be, says Zeus Kerravala, a senior vice president at Yankee Group. "That kind of move is more common in IT, not networking, he says.
On the compute side, IBM needs to do more work than either Cisco or HP in terms of creating the fabric over which the myriad resources are assembled, says George Weiss, a vice president and distinguished analyst with Gartner.
"It can do storage, and the server components in blades, and outboard the networking part, so it does deliver a fairly integrated type of architecture. But it's not as componentized and virtualized as what Cisco or HP are doing," he says.
If IBM can't compete on an architectural plane in the same ways the competition appears to be delivering benefits and ROI, then it could lose opportunities and market share, Weiss says.
Kerravala gives the nod to HP as having a bit of an advantage over IBM. "HP seems to have been thinking about this longer than IBM," he says. "IBM seems to be in a bit of reactionary mode."
But IBM stands by its looser architectural approach. "A one-size systems approach isn't going to work in this world," McCaffrey says. "We will continue to invest in different systems and platforms that are optimized to perform certain types of work, and we'll do this in a way that allows us to deliver a level of choice with special-purpose processing but still be manageable in a common, integrated fashion."
