[Am-info] Staying The Course Is The Right Strategy

[Fred A. Miller]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Palmisano: Staying The Course Is The Right Strategy

Samuel Palmisano, who becomes IBM's eighth chief executive on 
March 1, said Wednesday that he's confident the direction set by 
his predecessor, Lou Gerstner, is the right course for the 
company as the computer industry enters a new phase. In his 
first major public appearance since his appointment earlier this 
month, Palmisano assured business partners gathered at the 
company's annual PartnerWorld in San Francisco that IBM's focus 
on services that help companies build and integrate computing 
systems and the infrastructure software to run those systems is 
a strategy that fits the future of computing.

That strategy gives IBM the opportunity to sell hardware, 
software, and consulting services in a market that accounts for 
82% of the potential revenue within the high-tech industry, 
Palmisano said. Helping companies integrate applications across 
the enterprise and convert business processes from paper-based 
to electronic-based is a lucrative business. "The E-business era 
is all about end-to-end integration," he said.

Integration has grown in importance because mainframes that were 
introduced in the 1960s as part of a centralized computing model 
later evolved into a client-server architecture and then a 
distributed application paradigm. That has left companies with a 
mishmash of technology that all needs to communicate in order to 
build an E-business, Palmisano said. To address the integration 
problem, he said, IBM has called for more open industry 
standards to bridge proprietary systems.

Palmisano reminded the PartnerWorld audience that during the 
dot-com era, IBM stayed its course and didn't go after Internet 
companies that later went belly up. Instead, the company built a 
services division and technology focusing on core problems such 
as integration. Integration "is not about voodoo economics or 
business models that make no sense," he said.

Many of IBM's competitors are looking to adopt the same business 
model as IBM, Palmisano added. He gave the proposed Hewlett-
Packard and Compaq merger as one example and hardware vendor Sun 
Microsystems' focus on software and Linux as another. Said 
Palmisano, "We don't see the need for any major strategic shift 
like our competitors." - Antone Gonsalves

For full story, see
http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eF810Bce7K0V20BWtT0A6

And for more
Palmisano Named IBM CEO
http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eF810Bce7K0V20BV4z0Ae

- -- 
Fred A. Miller
Systems Administrator
Cornell Univ. Press Services
fm@cupserv.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org

iD8DBQE8dVEjIhTtc6nTZIIRAl/HAJ46NdN910EWBj4s8R+kUiohDpoOvgCfVkgT
c/9jqsmhw63YqsXxJXw6yY4=
=7IiX
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----