IBM officials last week hailed the supplier's On Demand
computing strategy and emphasised that customers can count on the
continued existence of its technologies.
Steve Mills, IBM's senior vice-president and group executive in
the IBM software group, touted the strength and popularity of IBM
product lines during a keynote speech at the IBM developerWorksLive
conference. He said, for example, that the WebSphere applications
platform has 50,000 customers, that the Eclipse development
platform has had 6.9 million downloads, and that the DB2 database
has more than 400,000 customers.
"These things are important because you want to make investments
in technology that are going to be durable, that are going to last,
that are going to be improved," Mills said. "You are looking for
durability, you're looking for a level of certainty in what are
clearly uncertain times."
IBM again pushed the company's On Demand strategy, also called
e-business On Demand, for integrated, end-to-end business processes
across companies and their partners, suppliers and customers.
The strategy leverages advanced technology and expertise to help
customers increase productivity, said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM
general manager for e-business On Demand.
"What we cannot do is just throw the technology at our
customers. Increasingly, it is our job to make sure that along with
our technology, we bring the expertise," he said.
IBM's business consulting group is looking at 17 different
industries to establish best practice schemes, he said.
Mills said IBM will deliver a set of hooks, connections, and
optimised routines that drive IBM language-based build tools to
different run-time environments.