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Investing in Smarter Systems

IBM’s commitment to continuous improvement is a major hallmark of our smarter systems and good grounds for investing today in the future

We’ve been talking a lot this year about IBM’s Smarter Systems for a Smarter Planet* strategy, which includes the new family of servers and storage designed to meet the complex demands of emerging workloads, applications and solutions. These systems are the result of IBM’s unmatched investments in research and development—nearly $6 billion in 2009 alone.

Introduced in February, new Power Systems* servers were the first smarter systems. With dazzling POWER7* technology, they’re optimized for current and future workloads to provide a quantum leap in real business value to clients.

Just as IBM makes sustained investments in the POWER* microprocessor roadmap—the most consistent and reliable in the industry—we also invest continuously in our software. This lets us create great new products, and just as important, develop new versions of existing software to deliver higher quality and new features and functions.

A good case in point is IBM Systems Director, our portfolio of systems-management products for comprehensive IT resource management (servers, storage and networks) from one point of control—a “single pane of glass.” The latest version, introduced in April, incorporates many improvements based on user experiences, feedback from IBM sales and technical teams, and internal assessments. In fact, the latest two versions of Systems Director, 6.1.2 and 6.2, incorporate a total of 56 improvements that address issues clients raised.

This quality-review process has produced some impressive gains for Systems Director users. For example, the scripted install process introduced with 6.1.2 is simpler for clients than the previous process. And with the new database prechecker in 6.2, clients can avoid more than 20 common mistakes that could consume up to a full day of debug. We haven’t stopped there. IBM has increased the timeliness of internal response teams to respond to specific client issues as they arise, so we can make our systems truly smarter all the time.

As IT leaders are challenged to manage increasingly complex environments, often with reduced budgets, the IBM Systems Director portfolio today is the strongest it’s ever been, enabling you to:

• Save between 34 and 42 percent in systems-management administration costs through optimization of server, storage and network utilization
• Reduce data-center energy costs from 15 percent up to 50 percent
• Enable faster, more flexible service delivery and deployment of new applications and workloads
• Simplify physical and virtual resource management across heterogeneous environments

I’m pleased to say the work we’re doing has been recognized in data centers. Systems Director downloads have increased by nearly 20 percent from January through April compared with the same period last year. I invite you to take a fresh look at this valuable package of IBM systems software at the Systems Director website (www.bit.ly/IBMsystemsdirector) and download page (www.bit.ly/IBMsddownload).

I think you’ll find proof that IBM’s commitment to continuous improvement is a major hallmark of our smarter systems and good grounds for investing today in the future.

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