Three or one Industry platforms?
Interestingly IBM has chosen not to include finance as one of its first industry platforms, despite its recent wins in the sector, including ANZ. Instead they have selected Retail, Education and IoT, although the last two do not seem to be aimed at specific verticals.
Retail
The clearest of the platforms to be aligned with an actual vertical, the press release states that it is: “A Consumer Engagement Platform that empowers retailers to quickly deploy increasingly sophisticated engagement capabilities driven by contextual, relevant, multi-channel, end-to-end personalization that deliver a “passion-driven” consumer experience. “ Detail in the announcement and on the IBM website about what this solution includes is slim though.
A month ago IBM briefed analysts about its plans for retail. According to Bola Rotibi, Research Director, Creative Intellect Consulting: “IBM told us they had 150 researchers working on commerce solutions around the globe. What they were focused on was how to provide a complete platform that would include all their existing businesses and the best way to deliver it was through a focused cloud.
“Retail was not the only business IBM talked about that day, it made it clear that it intended to deploy solutions for analytics, customer experience, IoT, MobileFirst, operations management, smarter commerce, smart workforce and supply chain across all of its main vertical market segments.”
Education
This solution offers a personalised learning platform that is aimed at both corporate solutions as well as the education market. This is a mixed message by IBM as education establishment have far greater requirements than merely looking after students and this feels more like a rebranding of a component of the HRM component of their solution.
What will be important here is that IBM already does a lot of cloud work with educational institutes through its Education Division. The big question here is whether this is to be just an IBM run cloud or whether this will become a cloud of cloud where IBM sees each educational institute deploying its own cloud and then linking to a larger cloud or set of clouds. If it goes this way it will have to co-operate with a number of competitors including Microsoft and Google who are both actively expanding their cloud footprint inside education.
IOT
IBM term this “Insights for a Connected World”. In theory most vertical industries are now trying to make use of the Internet if Things. While IBM have the tools to deliver platforms suitable for a vertical market one would hope that what appears to be announced here is available to the Retail solution as well. IBM see’s this market as being capable of collating the IOT data and being able to leverage and package it into a marketable form that can then be sold on, opening up new markets and opportunities for its clients.
Much of this is a big data play and IBM will be focusing on how it brings its analytics, big data and in particular its two hardware platforms IBM Power Systems and IBM zEnterprise into play. At one end of the market the data for this will be captured in transactional systems which will enable it to push its revised mainframe portfolio including LinuxONE. At the other end it will hope to take advantage of its POWER8 processor and its ability in recent benchmarks to outperform the latest Intel XEON processor when it comes to large complex data analytics.
Conclusion
While IBM has launched more than 20 solutions for specific business domains broadly categorised within Marketing, Finance, Operations and HRM this announcement is somewhat disappointing. When launching vertical platforms one would have expected IBM to be clear about what the specific differences are between the different domains and also identify clear vertical markets.
Only the Retail platform could be described as a clear vertical and outside of analyst briefings IBM has not established what specifically they will be offering within the 20 solutions that will appeal to customers in that sector. There is no doubt that IBM are capable of the shift required to realise this vision, and the fact that the Bangalore centre is ready to help customise the products are welcome but one hopes that their marketing material is more focused than this latest announcement.
Dr Sanjay Rishi, IBM Global Business Services, Managing Partner, Cloud Consulting Services commented “Our portfolio of Cloud Business Solutions is a recognition of the mandate for speed and time to value, along with the requirement of clients to personalize business solutions to their own processes and culture and deploy them via the cloud.”
“Our new IBM Cloud Business Innovation Center will help us co-create with our clients, addressing their unique needs with tailored solutions, delivered on the cloud for fast results.”
This may be the case but it seems to miss the point around vertical platform offerings.
