IBM 2009 Annual Report Download - page 9

software and optimized systems. We have also
established a portfolio of cloud services that clients
can access externally from IBM or offer internally
to users on their own premises. And because of
IBM’s track record of integrating new technology
paradigms like open source and the Internet into
the enterprise, we have earned the trust of clients
and the industry to bring reliability and security
to what is new.
4. Smarter Planet
All of these growth strategies come together in the
opportunity we call “smarter planet.” This is not
a metaphor. It describes the infusion of intelligence
into the way the world actually works, the way that
almost anything — any person, any object, any
process or any service, for any organization, large
or small — can now become digitally aware, net-
worked and intelligent. This means that industries,
infrastructures, processes, cities and entire societies
can be more productive, efcient and responsive.
3. Cloud and Next-Generation Data Center
As our planet becomes instrumented, interconnected
and intelligent, the computing model is evolving
to support it. Think of it as the industrialization of
IT. Over the past generation, our digital infrastruc-
tures have become very complex and inefcient,
so now we’re optimizing them through automation,
creating systems that are highly tuned to the
specic workloads they run and to new consump-
tion and delivery models, such as clouds.
Thus, the data center is shifting from being
a single physical place to something more like the
Internet, a diverse set of services fueled by IT.
This provides far more choice and exibility, of
particular interest to the many businesses and
governments that want simply to consume some
services they once built, maintained and provided
themselves. It also makes possible things that
were not previously so, such as modeling systemic
risk or creating integrated healthcare records.
However, with these new possibilities come new
challenges, in areas such as security. As a result, our
clients are seeking help in architecting and building
a new kind of highly efcient infrastructure that
is reliable and secure, even as it integrates services
from a variety of external sources.
We have invested billions of dollars in R&D and
acquisitions to build leadership in two key dimen-
sions of this new IT model: service management
We are seeing smarter systems
being implemented in every
major industry and across every
region of both the developed and
developing worlds . And they are
creating measurable economic
and societal value .
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A LETTER FROM THE CHAIRMAN