IBM, Google and the Blue Business Platform – May 01, 2008

Today was good !!

This morning. there was a main session built around “CIO 2.0”. The basic premise was that CIOs have now earned a seat at the business management table. With that privilege, they now need to have something worthwhile to say. In accordance with the session’s title then, CIOs are now at a crossroads ( or as Bob DeRodes, EVP and CIO of Home Depot put it, in the cross-hairs). CIOs now need to decide if they are going to block the influx of Web 2.0 technologies or if they are going to adopt, embrace and leverage these new capabilities within the enterprise.
This discussion clearly set up the big news for the day. Sam Palmisano, IBM President & CEO, and Eric Schmidt, Google Chairman and CEO, announcement of the Blue Business Platform. A much better John Simonds provides a much better description of the session in his blog, Delusions of Adequacy, but basically, Google and IBM have teamed up to provide a “Google-like” technical infrastructure. Built on top of IBM technology, this is an open platform designed to support global collaboration in the design and development of enterprise applications that can leverage cloud computing concepts. This really changes the meaning of convergence. Instead of waiting for everything to converge into one device, information and services will all converge into the computing cloud. Interaction with the cloud, however, would be standardized across the industry. In that way, any device you have would be able to interact seamlessly with all information data-types within the cloud.

This vision really is Web 2.0 creating real business value.