Transformation often starts with the fundamentals: a sturdy foundation and a blueprint for how to build upward and forward toward progress. It requires a return to first principles: reconsidering the most basic elements of a challenge to then build solutions from the ground up.
Read MoreWith IBM’s annual THINK Conference now behind us, I’m remembering the people who drive the innovation and disruption we showcase there — the product of collective collaboration, individual leadership, and ideation from IBMers and other thinkers around the world. A perfect example within IBM Data and AI is Serge Bourbonnais, STSM, Database Replication, who has spent over three decades pushing teams to modernize the replication space.
Read MoreEvery spring, IBM hosts our enormous Think Conference with days of lightning sessions, labs, workshops, presentations, and predictions from some of the smartest people in the world. Every year I come away amazed by what our customers are conceiving and achieving and by the role that we at IBM are able to play.
Watch my latest keynote from IBM Think 2019: Modernizing Your Data Estates for an AI and Multicloud World, where I talk about the path to data estate modernization, with David Bernert, VP Enterprise Architecture, Boeing.
Most of us strive to be life-long learners, but what does that mean in practice? For some, it means going deeper and deeper into our chosen field, refining our expertise in chemistry, carpentry, or cognitive science. For others, it means always exploring in new directions.
Read MoreOne of the great pleasures of connecting with our team is hearing about the endeavors and ideas people explore when they’re not at work. With Peter Plachta, that was a special treat. Peter’s interests range across physics, rock climbing, behavioral psychology, and the leadership that makes teams successful — at IBM and elsewhere.
Read MoreAs life moves forward day by day, sometimes it’s easy to forget how far we’ve come — personally, professionally, or both. Consider Simao Liu who came from Beijing to San Francisco just seven years ago for a master’s program in computer science. In her second year, she joined IBM as a QA intern and has spent the last six years making remarkable progress through the organization.
Read MoreI love my trips to IBM’s Krakow Lab. The city’s Old Town is alive with music pouring out of cathedrals, students strolling the Main Square in the evenings, and rowing teams slicing through the Wisla River at dawn — all watched over by a 14thc. castle on Wawell Hill.
Read MoreThere’s no one path to IBM, and no one path to becoming a designer. Whenever I travel to our labs and studios around the world, I meet employees who arrived at IBM from wildly unconventional backgrounds, using their unique pasts to inform the work they do every day. That’s been the case for Reena Ganga, a designer based out of SVL’s Design Studio, who spent the ten years before IBM working as a journalist and news anchor on Australian television. Over time, her impressive curiosity led her to the design field and a career at IBM.
Read MoreI originally started the “You in the Private Cloud” series as a way to introduce our talented team to each other across our many geographies. I knew it was important for us to know each other as more than email addresses or voices during meetings.
But I didn’t realize at the time that it would become one of the favorite parts of my job. I truly love settling in for great conversations with the terrific people working on IBM Analytics offerings across the globe.
Read MoreAs much as I love meeting long-time IBMers and hearing their perspective on our evolution over the years, it’s a special pleasure to visit with our newer team members and to hear their visions for IBM’s future. You’ll remember my conversations with Martyna Kuhlmann, Ketki Purandare, and Phu Truong.
Read MoreI have just finished presenting at the DataWorks Summit in San Jose. CA. where a partnership between IBM and HortonWorks was announced the aim of which is to help organizations further leverage their Hadoop infrastructures with advanced data science and machine learning capabilities.
Read MoreAll tech companies draw international talent, but arguably none more so than IBM. Our Analytics Development team alone has labs in Canada, Germany, India, Japan, China, and the US. It’s fascinating for me to hear first-hand the different paths you took to IBM; we are richer for your talent and for the different ways of thinking and for being you and what bring to the team. From Martyna, I learned what it’s like to live in a tiny village in Poland, steeped in the intimacy of village life and in Poland’s tradition of excellence in mathematics.
Read MoreWhat a pleasure it was to meet Sebastian! He was recommended to me as a technical whiz with Python™ skills par excellence, but he impressed me just as much with his infectious, happy energy, his thinking on the advancement of society and technology, and how he chooses to spend his time sharing his passion for electronics and software with children and adults at his local community center.
Read MoreReaders of this blog know that I like to imagine the world through the eyes of my young son. His effort to find the right balance of exploration and safety resonates with what we mean by “private cloud” and preparing clients for a hybrid cloud environment: private plus public.
Read MoreIn a previous blog I talked about the value of machine learning and how it could help organizations by making smarter predictions by continually learning and adapting models as it consumed new interactions, transaction and data. I compared that to how my son embraced learning about the world around him to become gradually smarter, more knowledgeable. But that doesn’t always mean he is going to make the best decision because he may not have all the information or foresee or correlate past events.
Read MoreBillions of connected devices, zetabytes of data, power and brand loyalty now in the hands of the consumer, businesses having to market and sell to each and every one of us. What just happened? Three driving forces – mobile, cloud and a continuing explosion of data. Everything just got personal.
Read MoreIn my last blog “Business differentiation through Machine Learning” I introduced and described the concepts of machine learning. We traced its origins from a computer science project to Watson showcasing and winning on the Jeopardy TV quiz show and its real world use across numerous industries including health care.
Read MoreI look at my child and marvel as he embraces the ever fast moving world around him, adapting to new experiences, grasping technology, absorbing a bombardment of information from so many sources. It’s staggering to watch their progress from basic learning of just accepting facts they are taught, to augmenting those facts with their own knowledge, to asking questions, using their knowledge to express their opinions and values to others, then challenging facts and hypotheses that they once accepted to adapting their knowledge, understanding, decisions and value systems.
Read MoreThe origins of Apache™Hadoop® go as far back as 2003 in reference to the emergence of a new file system, followed by the introduction of MapReduce and the birth of Hadoop in 2006. It achieved notoriety and fame as the fastest system to sort a terabyte of data and when it became an Apache open source project (Apache Hadoop) it sent a signal that it was ready for prime time. The world never looked back.
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