Cubegeek

What Should IBM Do With Red Hat?

Q: How does the Red Hat acquisition improve the IBM hybrid cloud offering?

A: I don’t think it particularly does. Not by itself. It’s very late for IBM to be trying something like this with one big fat caveat and that is that IBM strive to dominate the mid-market. That is to say that everything IBM has ever done with AS/400 has to die, right now, at IBM’s command. They need to stop supporting that operating system and make RHEL run on all IBM iron.

Then they need to reorient itself in the market and stop trying to make money on high end hardware until they can price it like clouds. In other words, they need to be able to sell two big IBM mainframes that run in a skanky environment and say that it can run 1000 containers simultaneously. That way you don’t have to go to the cloud until you outgrow that - and that path would be seamless. IBM mainframes therefore have to be drop dead rugged and shipped overnight in a container to any location with enough electricity. That’s attractive. That’s something nobody else will do. And that’s something that can be facilitated by a company the size of IBM. Why? Because IBM will finance the whole thing.

What IBM must do, in the end, is beat Salesforce.com. If it cannot beat Salesforce, then it has no business in the cloud. Because it cannot and will not beat AWS, GCP or Azure. IBM needs to master the downmarket as I said before[1].

Everything IBM must do with RedHat is make RHEL administrators and software devs feel like they have an inside track to a comprehensive set of cloud management APIs that give them a reason to stick with IBM for 5 years. That means whatever the IBM cloud looks like today, it had better port over to RHEL in short order and the RedHat people need to be really excited about that.

I don’t think IBM management is so courageous, and I do believe that the RedHat people are just going to be very happy with their stock premiums. I’d bet the best of them are ready to ride off into the sunset and that this purchase is their last hurrah. The alternative is that IBM provide an exciting vision that encompasses cloud, mid-market, devOps and big rugged IBM hardware.

IBM vision? Let’s wait and see, but if I see another animation of an MRI brain scan coming from IBM marketing, I’ll know they’ve run out of ideas.

 

 

The New Driver's Ed

In the news is a story of a driverless fatality in Tempe, Arizona. In the dark of night, a woman walking a bicycle across two lanes of traffic was struck and killed by one of Uber's new autonomous vehicles. Behind the wheel was a driver who was momentarily distracted, probably by a tablet in his hands, while the autopilot of the car cruised along at just under 40 miles per hour and ran the poor woman down. The article I read about the story quoted at least two experts who said that the lidar equipped machine should have easily seen the pedestrian and avoided the accident. I was most interested in the final paragraphs. 

Raj Rajkumar, a Carnegie Mellon University professor and founder of an autonomous-vehicle software company that he later sold, suggested the laser sensor may have had a blind spot around the vehicle because of its position mounted on the roof. Still, he said, he would have expected the software to have reacted.

“Legally speaking, the pedestrian may be at fault,” Mr. Rajkumar said. “But mature, reliable self-driving vehicle technology would have done better by slowing down or changing lanes, and this major incident would have been prevented.”

I have been in the IT industry for decades and one of the most fabulously successful products ever was the iPhone. I've been using mine for 7 years. My mother has been using hers for 2 months and she gets lost all the time. She is computer literate, but a lot less so than I. The distance between what I can digest as a professional at this stage in my career and what ordinary folks can understand is the gap into which a great deal of VC money is thrown in expectation of aggregating many multiples of that in consumer spending. Yes, I have a very new, very advanced, very capable iPhone device in my pocket and I use it all of the time. It works exceedingly well for me because I am highly discriminating in my consumption of applications, and I know how application designers think when they are building for the iPhone. In that way I am immune to bad apps, and I don't get lost. Half of all wisdom is knowing what to throw away. Simple works best.

So while journalists will have ready access to founders and professors who will state what might be professionally obvious, pedestrians and the rest of the world are puzzled as to exactly what went wrong. I suspect as the story of autonomous vehicles grows, we will all find out sooner or later, most likely later. It has always been my opinion that as cars learn to pace themselves in traffic that we humans are going to have the hardest time understanding their protocols. Indeed the future of driver education will not focus so much on skills of the drivers as to understanding how cars have been programmed to think about themselves and about traffic. That's a long, dark and narrow road for all of us to travel. 

What's legal today ought to be perfectly obvious. We have had crosswalks for generations. We have had crosswalks in law for generations. These things are perfectly obvious because we've had a very long time to learn the legal and physical truth about crosswalks. Lidar? Not so much. There will not be human and animal analogs for the way lidar perceives or the way cars will communicate with each other. We will have to learn new concepts and adapt. Or we will simply have to drive. 

What is it like to drive in traffic with cars that don't have human drivers? We are going to have to change our perception. We know 'idiot drivers' and are quick to identify their idiosyncrasies on the road, because we understand human inattention. He's weaving like a drunk. She's obviously on her cellphone. He's obliviously blasting beats. She's a student driver.  He's an old man. But Tempe offers a perfect example of a driver unable to recognize his own vehicle's inattention. 

 I've been a gearhead all my life and am probably unusually attracted to and informed about cars given my inexperience in actually repairing them. So I am fairly geeky into racing and the skills associated with demanding driving. I will trust autonomous driving machines when they start winning rally races and drifting competitions. Analogously, when computers were only reliable in playing an excellent game of tic-tac-toe, the mastery of chess was the benchmark for intelligence. I think that's were autonomous cars are now, four squares of tic tac toe rather than just three, with three being mere cruise control and lane alerts. It ain't chess, and it's far from go. 

Here's the thing though. When machine learning figures driving out, it's still going to think like a machine and not like a human. That means there will be hacks and vulnerabilities machines will have navigating 3d spaces that we humans will have to study very diligently to understand. I expect a lot of that diligent conceptualization to happen at Carnegie Mellon, but not in DMV parking lots. We can only hope that traffic law changes very slowly. 

Where Are My Drugs Now?

I have had the unique opportunity to be involved in shepherding members of my family through a maze of healthcare delivery systems. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to Amazon to gain a presence in this industry.

The system that clearly doesn't exist and should is a secured link between medical prescribers and pharmacy inventories. If I were Jeff Bezos I would get busy readying my M&A people to purchase Caremark. CVS is, to my knowledge, the most thorough and extensive business that handles the delivery of pharmaceuticals. But they also deliver other services, like roadside assistance. Strategically, Amazon has the most to gain by extending their ability to coordinate and deliver more services. So sentimentality aside, Walgreens name recognition might work better for the short term, and lord knows they need a makeover, but Caremark is a better target. As for Right-Aid, there's a bit too much overlap with Whole Foods. So Caremark.

I learned a long time ago that delivery and inventory controls were a very significant part of the value of Philip Morris profitability. In exchange for signage in convenience stores, they offered free point of sale systems. Those systems in a coordinated fashion allowed the tobacco giant to figure out how much of their product was leaving retail. Since they knew how much they were producing on the manufacturing end, they could estimate how much was in transit and inventory  in the part of the supply chain they did not control, logistics and transportation. The competitor there was McLane Logistics. PM was able to figure out how much inventory to sell the McLane and squeeze inefficiencies out of their delivery system.

This is something that is clearly not done in the pharmaceutical business, and whomever gets there first will have a huge leg up. There are few things more nerve wracking for patients than to have a prescription on hand and not be able to fill it in a timely manner. That doctors and pharmacies depend on office hours and phone calls is absolutely ridiculous.

Amazon as Conglomerate

Here's the highlight reel. When Peter Drucker invented the MBA part of the idea of professional business management was that ordinary individuals could be trained to run a business. Not a generalized business, but a specialized business in some category. (NAICS codes). The way Harvard has been teaching case studies was that within the scope of business and product analysis such a cadre would be measured and their public company made an indicator by P&L and balance sheet metrics to the public shareholders. IE, IBM competes in its NAICS sector, becomes a market leader taking product share away from competitors, then you know to buy the IBM ticker. All the analysis is around product competition and market share and the effectiveness of management has everything to do with its ability to execute in that narrow area.

 

This doesn't work for general contractors. This doesn't work for hospitals. This doesn't work for software. This doesn't work for conglomerates. Shareholder maximization only works for certain kinds of single focus businesses. So long as the balance sheet works, in this narrow way of looking at business performance, you can justify all kinds of trickery which is not good management or good governance.

 

So there are only a few management teams, relatively speaking, who know how to make a company profitable on narrow profit margins. A conglomerate can have a balanced portfolio of businesses that won't suffer the business cycle. That's how Berkshire Hathaway makes money. By running multiple businesses in different NAICS and not making their whole company dependent on a killer app. Each of these businesses, after a time, contribute to a large pool of funds that allows the directors to make experimental buys in new areas, instead of mergers in the same area. Bezos has said specifically that Amazon can afford to make billion dollar mistakes, because the underlying businesses are already fully capitalized and don't need to keep growing or be leveraged before they are mature.

 

People have wanted AWS to be spun off from Amazon for years, and Wall Street has been hedging on the stock price because before it became a market leader, he never broke out it's P&L and balance sheet from the whole of the company. Wall Street for the most part doesn't know how to do company management analysis either. That's why index funds are winning. Anyway, conglomerates are safer from hostile takeovers because the executives actually understand how to run their businesses and there is no incentive to sell out the business. That's why a class of Silicon Valley VCs and entrepreneurs loathe the idea of working for Amazon. There's no exit strategy. You don't exit conglomerates. They scale horizontally.

 

It's interesting how well Bezos has run it as a conglomerate, given the bad news recently about GE. I don't think, outside of P&G, that most Americans understand conglomerates. So I'm hoping that Amazon does a stock split and gets listed on the Dow.

Where Have All the Xeroids Gone?

(from the archives 2005)

I talked to my boy Marty this long weekend. He runs part of the facilities department over at Xerox El Segundo. His was a tale of woe. I owe a lot of my professional development to the management style of Xerox - continuous quality improvement and all. So it was hard for me to hear what he had to say.

I started my first internship for the Big X back in 1983, my first summer in college. Since I had some real-world work experience, I was fortunate enough to land a spot with the MBA candidates and worked in the Centralized Printing Systems Division several levels beneath the legendary Hoshi Printer. Yes, Printer was his last name. Last time I checked, he was making moola at Cars.com. So I had seven years of Xerox on my resume by 1990 when I went full-time into the software business.

About that time, Xerox had proven two things. Number one, it was master of the copier and printer business. Number two, it didn't know squat about the computer, software and networks business. Xerox stock limped along in the low 20s for my entire career there and its employee count was about 100,000. Here in El Segundo, where we used to actually sweat about being a target of Russian nukes, there was a vigorous set of employees of Xerox. The legendary A&E building housed first rate engineers and brown shuttle vans took folks around the campus of about 18 buildings. I myself had worked in CP-8, CP-10, XC-1 and XC-2. I sometimes had lunch in one of the 'M' buildings, the big M1 cafeteria. As an intern, I toured through M2 where some of America's first 'surface mount' technology was being deployed for Xerox printer circuit boards.

Marty says that there are about 60k people who work for Xerox now. A&E is down to about 600 employees and only two of the eight M buildings still even belong to Xerox. Over in Xerox Centre, office space had been empty so long that Xerox was renting to all comers for as little as 1.50 per square foot. The boom days of El Segundo are long gone.

Today, Lexmark printers are no joke. HP dominates the 'decentralized' print world. Warnock made Adobe and all the rest is history. But it remains stunning to me that these very buildings, the whole of the Xerox campus has been so drastically reduced. Where have they gone? How long are those who are left going to stay?

It's all design work, so I've been told. It's what we do best in the US, come up with new ideas and figure out ways to sell them. But I miss the days of end to end, where you could be on campus and know you were 10,000 stong. Where the spirit of a company pulling together, from design to test to manufacturing to sales and marketing distribution and support were all in walking distance. The virtual corporation is real. We in IT and our crafty MBAs made it possible. Now El Segundo is less than it used to be.

I wonder what's going on at Northrop.

 

via cobb.typepad.com

Xerox is in the news as FujiXerox takes over.

(from the archives 2005)

I talked to my boy Marty this long weekend. He runs part of the facilities department over at Xerox El Segundo. His was a tale of woe. I owe a lot of my professional development to the management style of Xerox - continuous quality improvement and all. So it was hard for me to hear what he had to say.

I started my first internship for the Big X back in 1983, my first summer in college. Since I had some real-world work experience, I was fortunate enough to land a spot with the MBA candidates and worked in the Centralized Printing Systems Division several levels beneath the legendary Hoshi Printer. Yes, Printer was his last name. Last time I checked, he was making moola at Cars.com. So I had seven years of Xerox on my resume by 1990 when I went full-time into the software business.

About that time, Xerox had proven two things. Number one, it was master of the copier and printer business. Number two, it didn't know squat about the computer, software and networks business. Xerox stock limped along in the low 20s for my entire career there and its employee count was about 100,000. Here in El Segundo, where we used to actually sweat about being a target of Russian nukes, there was a vigorous set of employees of Xerox. The legendary A&E building housed first rate engineers and brown shuttle vans took folks around the campus of about 18 buildings. I myself had worked in CP-8, CP-10, XC-1 and XC-2. I sometimes had lunch in one of the 'M' buildings, the big M1 cafeteria. As an intern, I toured through M2 where some of America's first 'surface mount' technology was being deployed for Xerox printer circuit boards.

Marty says that there are about 60k people who work for Xerox now. A&E is down to about 600 employees and only two of the eight M buildings still even belong to Xerox. Over in Xerox Centre, office space had been empty so long that Xerox was renting to all comers for as little as 1.50 per square foot. The boom days of El Segundo are long gone.

Today, Lexmark printers are no joke. HP dominates the 'decentralized' print world. Warnock made Adobe and all the rest is history. But it remains stunning to me that these very buildings, the whole of the Xerox campus has been so drastically reduced. Where have they gone? How long are those who are left going to stay?

It's all design work, so I've been told. It's what we do best in the US, come up with new ideas and figure out ways to sell them. But I miss the days of end to end, where you could be on campus and know you were 10,000 stong. Where the spirit of a company pulling together, from design to test to manufacturing to sales and marketing distribution and support were all in walking distance. The virtual corporation is real. We in IT and our crafty MBAs made it possible. Now El Segundo is less than it used to be.

I wonder what's going on at Northrop.

Crackhead Barbie: A Data Story

(True Story circa 1991)
I have spent the past 30 years building Business Intelligence systems. The very basic idea is that there are some things humans do well, and there are things computers do well. The magic is found when you make them work together.

The management at Mattel had a problem, which is that on any given Christmas, nobody knows what the hot toy is going to be. For all of their years of successes, it’s very hard to predict which product is going to win and which will lose. But some time around November, things get crazy, and the execs had better decide which set of all of their thousands of products should get the green light for full manufacturing blast.

As with every business, especially in consumer markets, making supply meet demand is sometimes art, sometimes science and sometimes pure guesswork. So how can you get 50 managers, each pulling for their own favorites to come to a consensus about what’s best for the company? Well, it’s almost easy. You tell them to put their money where their mouth is.

So I was hired to integrate the list of products into a system that allowed managers to create syndicates and present those syndicates to the execs who would then make wagers (with votes) to gather a consensus. So you had maybe 300 different Barbies 400 different Hot Wheels and yoyos and slime and monsters and who knows what else. I got all of the product SKUs and put them all on a menu that managers could select some combination of products they expected to win. We then integrated that with sales data that came in on a day by day basis and gave a custom aggregation of the product mix.

So instead of saying 1/2 Barbie 1/3 Hot Wheels or something like that, we got into a level of granularity for which they had never been able to plan. In time, leading syndicates began to be more obvious and instead of shouting matches about seniority and “I know this business like the back of my hand”, the senior management of Mattel had real data.

In every business in every industry, there are things that management does because they guess and there are things they do because they know. You would be shocked and amazed at how much guessing there is. And even where there is good guessing, you would be stunned to find how how much resistance there is against executive decision-making, not to mention sheer inability to distinguish rumor from actual policy (if and when policy is clear). Making business data-driven is a very big deal and most of the time, very difficult to accomplish. Even companies with the right data at the right time delivered to the right people can fail to execute.

If every business were data-driven, only few would fail. And of course if anyone could do it, we’d all be rich. You should never assume that management knows everything it needs to know about the operations of their businesses. They assume. They suppose. They engage in wishful thinking and they hope. Parents of teens understand this.

PS. You would think that when the company hired me as an expensive consultant, they’d have all of their data ready for my development work. Ha! It took a while for me to get access to the actual database with the product names at Mattel. In the meantime I had to make up names, thus Crackhead Barbie.

 

A Rant Against FANG

Not the companies, the term.

(somebody asked me if FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) should be the targets of anti-trust action.)

FANG is, in the first case, only a term used by Wall Street traders and hedge fund managers to talk about the most successful parts of the IT markets that they actually don't understand. Meaning their lazy asses won't bother to do analysis on any particular company because they are in fact market makers who sell market making to their customers, who also don't give a rat's ass about the details of a company. They leave that business to VCs who are also playing wheel of fortune shotgun whack a mole with other people's money and some of their own disposable capital.

 

In other words and in short, Amazon, Google, and Facebook are conglomerates primarily *because* bankers and investment bankers don't know jack about their component businesses enough to loan them money. That's how this whole industry got started and that's why startups are startups, and why all this non-traditional financing happened in the first place. There is a generation of people with money and power who decided to stay asleep. Zuckerberg's no genius, he simply capitalized on an abandoned field.

 

Every major corporation in the Fortune 100 has more than enough capital to hire 200 software engineers that could be the next big thing. Almost none of them have the culture, the experience or the balls.

 

Guess what else? Most of the companies who get close to an understanding of what anti-trust actually would mean in this industry are part of the problem. How on earth could anybody suggest going after anti-trust NOT talk about Salesforce, Microsoft, SAP or Oracle?

 

Finally, this is quite a joke because most of the smart money is on free software. The software industry is still too chaotic for most of the old bastards to understand or trust. They simply cannot comprehend the business models and they don't understand the network effect of value that these companies create. They can't wrap their heads around decentralization itself.

Red vs Blue

I'm browsing in an attempt to understand my marketing job a little bit better. Look what I found 

So if you want to know the difference between real clouds and fake clouds, here is a sample. First, sadly, I got an email today from ODTUG and found the acronym EPCRS or something like that. So I went to the Oracle website and found this non-embeddable animation on what it's about. So literally, they don't even show the product, and what they do show isn't even compatible with blogs. I mean it comes up in a popup window on Oracle's own website and it's crap. It doesen't even show the animation in a decent window.

 

Then there's Domo, which is a client of ours.  They have their own YouTube channel. They understand social media. Oracle looks like The Hartford Insurance Company by comparison. I have seen Domo tech and it's very cool. The backend is even more interesting than the front-end, which is formidable. These guys get it. 

Dodeca Rules Again

Tim Tow of AppliedOLAP is one of those guys you know in the industry that reminds you that excellence is its own reward. He has been one of the go-getters that I've always admired working with and knowing. We spoke together on the phone today for the first time in years and his baby, Dodeca, is all growed up. 

As part of our strategic marketing at Full360 we will begin developing vertical markets for our data platform and go after those customers. After a long time of feeling rather sorry for Essbase and the EPM part of our business, the progress of Dodeca and its customer successes have warmed my old cold cockles. I've taken some notes about the things I most specifically need in Dodeca for a customer or two I'm thinking about. But here's the turning point. Dodeca has proven to me today that the true spirit of Essbase has not been lost and buried in the competition for the market domination of Oracle Middleware, which has been a battle royale for mid-tier technology in the enterprise market for years. What did Dodeca do today? It convinced me once and for all that Essbase can dominate with a single fat client reporting platform based on the world-beating concept of the spreadsheet. It's all the front-end Essbase will ever need.

For many years, there seemed to be nothing capable of beating the simple, pure combination of Essbase and the Excel Add-In. It was simple, fast and powerful. Then came a bunch of big front-end integration ideas that made sense on paper and passed muster of integration test, but lost the spirit and speed of discovery. Then, before ASO, Essbase itself was starting to show signs of fatigue in dealing with larger higher order dimensional models. And once that was overcome, came the problem of drill-through, which still had some security problems four years ago, not to mention timeout issues with APS when the data got big. Today, I believe firmly that a one-two punch of EAS driven Essbase and Dodeca's current version is all anybody on the planet needs for that holy grail of multiuser-concurrent-multidimensional read/write data with security down to the cell level. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the return of speed of thought, brought to you by C# fat client .NET brilliance. This is not a slow clap. This is a little bit of giddy excitement, and I'm really too old for that. 

While Full360 has been plunging the depths of new paradigms of data management, parallelization and asynchronous data streams, real-time processing and massive query spaces, we've lagged a bit behind on the current comings and goings of the datamart world. In other words, we've been fulfilling our mission of being cloud-focused data experts. Now with some renewed spirit, our longtime friendship and partnership with ApplieOLAP brings to mind a lot of interesting possibilities. 

So.. to wit.

 Highlights

• - Essbase Java API
• - All versions of Essbase since 6.5.3
• - JDBC support
• - custom starting points by user
• - xcopy for .NET deployments to Citrix
• - APS and/or straight TCP connection to Essbase
• - MySQL, MSSQL or Oracle repository, no special server-side scripting
• - Highly scalable to thousands of users.

Dodeca is the best way to get fast data out of Essbase. It is extremely configurable in ways that serve user requirements over technology requirements. It is a .NET based product that takes a bottoms-up approach to getting Essbase multidimensional data into grids. It has extended the ability of Essbase to deliver tens of thousands of rows at the old 'speed of thought' speeds. It is a managed spreadsheet environment under complete administrative control with hybrid drill-through capabilities.

Dodeca is entirely spreadsheet-centric and is exhaustively so. It uses highly specific defined data areas to perform multiple multi-sourced retrieves from data sources.  It has control of all events both local and specific to Essbase API and remote JDBC operations. This allows a multi-layering, multi-query ability to draw data into the spreadsheet exactly where it is needed. Dodeca can employ any of the 300+ Excel functions to manage front-end calculations.

AppliedOLAP has re-engineered the spreadsheet interface and allowed Essbase to work to its full potential writing with C# that which used to be VBA. The product is clearly superior to all other Essbase front-ends. If you want to work with data in the spreadsheet paradigm, it is the gold standard. Dodeca's performance is remarkable and handles 100,000 row retrievals with ease. Its ability to cascade data into multiple tabs of a spreadsheet is beyond anything I've ever seen.  It has managed both to allow highly complex database operations as well as keep basic ones fast and simple.

Mastery of Dodeca will take time. It clearly is aimed, for more sophisticated applications, towards .NET programmers comfortable with that level of detail and control. If you have complex workflow rules and highly detailed report requirements, you're going to have such people in IT anyway.  But I see every indication that a quickstart implementation and its ability to use basic Excel templates support rapid prototyping any VBA competent guy can pull off with ease at smaller companies. No doubt AppliedOLAP with its long and deep roots in the Oracle customer community has plenty of third-party developers at hand. 

I am impressed with Tim's direction in making a tool that, with its flexibility, makes for simpler implementation leveraging the dynamism of the Essbase query space, rather than fill up servers with canned reporting each with a single query statement. It's a win. And suddenly Essbase is way more interesting again. 

What IBM Should Do

If I were in charge of IBM this is what I would do. 

First thing to do is get rid of PWC. You have to admit that these guys were hired simply because IBM software and processes were too complex for customers to implement on their own. You have to ask yourself how did Facebook succeed without an army of consultants? It succeeded because the software made things obvious. That is what you can do with advanced web design. So what IBM has to do is change the way they think about software and systems implementation. Here's my idea. 

IBM cannot compete with Amazon,  Google or Microsoft Azure in the pure cloud space. They are already too late to attract new customers and all They can do is convert their installed base. And if that's not giving that installed base a price break then they cannot improve the revenue. IBM cannot compete with Intel; the PowerPC chipset is dead.

So what IBM has to do is go after the fractured midmarket and leapfrog all the small competitors in that arena and consolidate that business. This will be all about cutting off the high end from Apple and Microsoft and then eroding the market share of SAP and Oracle. But IBM also has something that midmarket software vendors do not have which is lots of capital. This means that IBM can put cells physically in markets where small competitors are at a loss. More on that in a minute.

The place where IBM's going to make cash is by competing in broadband. Google fiber is going to be a competitor, But I think an IBM Cisco partnership would make mince meat out of Time Warner cable Comcast and seriously put a hurting on Verizon. Broadband is a cash cow. IBM can makes sense of new net neutrality work rules and lock out any other smaller players in this market. 

So what does this mean? This means in any town with more than 50,000 people IBM will have a branch that branch will be like a WeWork / CoLoft presence. It will attract all the young programmers who don't want to go to places like PWC. It will give IBM first crack at rewriting all of the midmarket applications which would be no-brainers for these young ambitious programmers. Build next-generation software for the mid market and let them leapfrog all the legacy systems. This gives IBM new face, a cloud face, for all of their current AS/400 legacy systems. Mass migration. Lift and shift. IBM's first purchase? Workday. IBM's next purchase? RadioShack store fronts. IBM needs to keep its mainframe business for a time, but shed its other branded hardware server business faster than Dell and HP. Everything is apps. IBM has the advantage. 

Put IBM into the mainstream of the midmarket and take it over. Build next-generation cloud capable applications with more customer responsibility then Amazon or Google are ready to take. Run that section of the business life PeopleSoft used to be. Serve coffee in the IBM workcenters. Cohost meetups. Make it your friendly neighborhood IBM. Get into fast cycle agile development of mid market applications that scale. Apps for business. Same approach as AS/400 with next-generation technology and a new wave of developers, excuse me, 'devs'.  Here's the trick. Do an open source of IBM Research algorithms to the IBM cloud and a small license fee to off-IBM cloud implementations. Buy Raxspace if you have to and host a second kind of open-standards cloud. Two cloud models, one company. Only IBM could do that. 

There's a question about salesforce.com. And that question is whether their API is sufficiently robust to compete with the APIs of AWS and Google. Here I'd make a side-bet on Apple Swift. I would bet that Java is dead. Let Oracle have it. But I would also make bets on Python and Ruby. I would also make bets on GoLang because it's a good thing for IBM to be totally open, however, Java has too much legacy crap that existed before the era of clouds. Make a fresh start.

At some point let's say four years from now. The functionality gap between the new midmarket apps and the Legacy IBM mainframe apps will become clear. My bet would be on the 80/20 rule that scaling up the midmarket apps will be cost beneficial to current mainframe customers. The 20% that can't migrate now pay a premium. The rest they bring over and lock out the rest of the market with lower prices. This will put pressure on SAP and Oracle and revitalize the 'enterprise' space. The enterprise space is now a web-beautiful, neighborhood-centric dev's paradise, and those young hungry programmers get a crack in SAP and Oracle at Microsoft and Google and anybody else who tries to enter the business app space. And oh by the way IBM's broadband will now be at an appreciable market share, in the new world of net neutrality regulation. ROLM, anyone?