The weekend review: the IBM-SoftLayer acquisition and rethinking innovation
This week on GigaOM Research, our analysts closely followed IBM’s announcement around its acquisition of SoftLayer, a major deal in the cloud infrastructure space that could have reverberations across the entire tech market. Don’t forget: Speakers from both IBM and SoftLayer will be onstage at our Structure conference later this month; be sure to register now and use your GigaOM Pro subscriber discount before tickets sell out. Other popular research content on GigaOM Research looks at innovation at a systemic level as well as the changing role of the IT department.
First, on the heels of IBM’s June 4 acquisition of SoftLayer, a major cloud infrastructure provider, Larry Carvalho provides a brief analysis of the implications of this deal on the greater IT ecosystem. In “Impacts of the IBM-SoftLayer deal on the cloud industry,” Carvalho provides a quick overview of IBM’s corporate history and specifically investigates how the deal, estimated to be worth about $2 billion, will affect competitors such as HP and Dell and what benefits and challenges IBM will face in the near-term future.
Next, in “Rethinking innovation: how to manage ideas systematically,” Haydn Shaughnessy looks at innovation on a systemic level and explores four major trends that will play a major role in innovation in the near-term future: enterprise crowdfunding, narrow innovation strategies, a rebirth of manufacturing, and moving from Six Sigma to algorithmic innovation. Shaughnessy provides an overview of current innovation strategies, particularly how open innovation and narrow innovation have been met with systematic innovation, and four ways innovation will evolve through 2013.
Last, in “Shadow IT is growing because everything is IT,” Stowe Boyd opens with a provocative statistic: Shadow IT — IT not handled by the official corporate IT group — is expected to become 90 percent of all IT purchases by 2020. With that in mind, Boyd goes on to select four major trends in IT, including BYOD and ubiquitous computing, and he demonstrates how and why they portend the end of the traditional CIO role as well as the end of IT as we know it.
Also popular this week:
The new building blocks for IT: OpenStack, continuous delivery, and devops
Survey: How apps can solve photo management
