IBM 2009 Annual Report Download - page 23

IBM’s clear strategy has enabled steady results in core busi-
ness areas, while expanding its offerings and addressable markets.
The key tenets of this strategy are:
• Deliver value to enterprise clients through integrated busi-
ness and IT innovation
• Build/expand strong positions in growth initiatives
• Shift the business mix to higher-value software and services
• Become the premier globally integrated enterprise
These priorities reflect a broad shift in client spending away from
“point products” and toward integrated solutions, as companies
seek higher levels of business value from their IT investments.
IBM has been able to deliver this enhanced client value thanks to
its industry expertise, understanding of clients’ businesses and
the breadth and depth of the company’s capabilities.
IBM’s growth initiatives, like its strengthened capabilities, align
with these client priorities. These initiatives include Smarter Planet
and Industry Frameworks, Growth Markets, Business Analytics
and Cloud Computing. Each initiative represents a significant
growth opportunity with attractive profit margins for IBM.
Smarter Planet and Industry Frameworks
Smarter Planet is an overarching strategy that highlights IBM’s
differentiated capabilities and generates broad-based demand
for the company’s products and services. Smarter Planet
encapsulates IBM’s view of enterprise IT’s next major revolution:
the instrumentation and integration of the world’s processes
and infra structures—from energy grids and pipelines to supply
chains and traffic systems. The massive amount of data these
systems are generating can now be captured and analyzed.
This infusion of intelligence enables more efficiency, productivity
and responsiveness.
Clients seeking these “smart” solutions value IBM’s deep
industry and process expertise, powerful back-end systems and
data analytics, complex systems integration capability and unique
research capacity.
IBM’s Industry Frameworks create a flexible software foun-
dation for developing, acquiring and deploying smart industry
solutions. Each framework supports multiple solutions, enabling
fast, efficient and tailored capabilities in support of clients’ busi-
ness needs. These frameworks represent a proven technique for
the company to engage with its clients, driving sustained growth
and high business value. They cover a wide variety of industries
and domains, most of which are directly tied to Smarter Planet.
Growth Markets
The company has benefited from its investments over the past
several years in growth markets. The focus now is on geographic
expansion of IBM’s presence; on specific industry verticals of the
highest impact and opportunity; on countries’ build-out of infra-
structure aligned with their national agendas; and on creating
markets and new business models to serve the different require-
ments that exist in these emerging countries.
In order to support this growth, IBM is continuing to invest
significantly in these markets to expand capacity and develop
talent. At the same time, IBM is expanding and benefiting from
large teams of talent with global missions of delivery. The com-
pany continues to deepen its research and development (R&D)
teams to design for the unique challenges and rapid growth
facing these markets.
Business Analytics and Optimization
Business optimization through the application of advanced ana-
lytics is emerging as another major category of business value.
It succeeds earlier generations of back-office automation, basic
enterprise resource planning and traditional business intelligence.
Advanced analytics allow clients to see patterns in data they
could not see before, understand their exposure to risk and pre-
dict the outcomes of business decisions with greater certainty.
IBM’s approach is end-to-end, providing cross-enterprise as
well as industry-based analytics solutions. IBM has established
the Business Analytics and Optimization practice, leveraging IBM
consulting capabilities and software products, along with sys-
tems and research assets. IBM’s breadth of expertise uniquely
positions the company for revenue and profit growth.
Cloud Computing
“Cloud” is an emerging consumption and delivery model for many
IT-related services. Clients are attracted to its improved econom-
ics, flexibility and user experience. Traditional enterprise IT will
increasingly integrate with these new cloud deployments, deliv-
ered as services via the Internet (also known as public clouds) or
behind a firewall (private clouds). In discussions with enterprise
clients, most are initially focused on private cloud implementa-
tions, the middle ground between the traditional enterprise IT and
public clouds.
IBM is helping clients determine how to leverage cloud com-
puting to achieve business advantage. The company provides a
full set of capabilities, from support in designing and implement-
ing cloud solutions, to services for running and managing them
if desired. IBM is applying its deep experience in critical areas
such as security, reliability and innovation to deliver differentiated
value. The company is also investing in new cloud initiatives tai-
lored to particular industries, in conjunction with its partners and
clients, to deliver cloud business services directly to the market.
By providing deployment choice, optimizing solutions based
on workload characteristics and delivering complete service
management capabilities, IBM is positioned as the leading cloud
service and infrastructure provider for enterprises.
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