Perspectives on IT Industry
Richard Friedrich, Ph.D.
Director, Strategy and Innovation Office
HP
IT is in front of unprecedented tasks for industry and humanity. It is continuously being asked to do more with less, while increasingly delivering more business value. In the presence of contemporary innovation in all facets of technology, a lot of IT requirements remained the same, while some new emerged. What stayed the same: the need to communicate between humans and between robots with more bandwidth, latency and ease of use; the need for automation to offload mundane and repetitive tasks; and ability to process data and events using automata and in real-time. What emerged as new requirements: ubiquitous connectivity from wherever to wherever, enabling ubiquitous access to information and services; delivery of IT and other functionality as a service from the Cloud, effectively creating global service marketplaces; and progressive creation of enormous amounts of data generated by humans and sensors and analyzed for patterns, both anomalous and desired, resulting in an information overload. All of this is expected to be accomplished in a planet-friendly manner, so called green IT.
HP as well as its partners and competitors in Silicon Valley and around the world have embarked on these challenges, and you can read about some of related research projects available off of the HP Labs Web sites: http://www.hpl.hp.com.
Josephine Cheng
IBM Fellow and Vice President
Almaden Research Center
Data is being captured as it has never been before. Location, temperature, security and condition of every item in a global supply chain, the growing torrent of information from billions of individuals using social media, petabytes of digital health records and so much more is pouring in at unprecedented speeds. With a billion transistors for every human on the planet, customers, citizens, students and patients are telling us what they think, what they want and what they’re witnessing – and all this data is far more real-time than ever before.
The problem is that data by itself isn’t useful, and the tsunami is only beginning. While the massive increase in available data empowers us to derive more meaningful insights, it calls on us to help clients manage it all securely, find patterns quickly and employ powerful computing paradigms to use that information to predict the future to make informed decisions.
This requires technology vendors to think beyond the immediate, and imagine an increasingly intelligent and miniaturized world. IBM sees the future of IT as more than just pushing the boundaries of technology, but as chasing the possibility of science. To that end, the company continues to invest not only in applied research projects that contribute to the bottom line today but is teaming up with clients and partners around the world in forward-looking exploratory science endeavors to understand where the cutting edge of computer science meets physics, chemistry and biology.
For more, visit: http://www.almaden.ibm.com