Watson Creates New Entry for Gartner Hype Cycle

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What: ”Gartner’s 2011 Hype Cycle Special Report provides strategists and planners with an assessment of the maturity, business benefit and future direction of over 1,900 technologies, grouped into 76 distinct Hype Cycles. The Hype Cycle graphic has been used by Gartner since 1995 to highlight the common pattern of overenthusiasm, disillusionment and eventual realism that accompanies each new technology and innovation. The Hype Cycle Special Report is updated annually to track technologies along this cycle and provide guidance on when and where organizations should adopt them for maximum impact and value.”

How: ”a new entry for natural language question answering recognizes the impressive and highly visible achievement of IBM’s Watson computer in winning TV’s Jeopardy! general knowledge quiz against champion human opponents.”

Full overview at MarketWatch.

IBM Says Get Rid of IT

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What: “Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of IBM Software & Systems, had a clear message for the 7,000 delegates in Las Vegas on Monday: “Doing more computing with fewer boxes is a good thing fundamentally. Anyone thinking otherwise is not thinking clearly.””

Why: “Urging IT managers to move from sprawl to consolidation, Mills outlined a series of statistics to back up his point. He highlighted the 1.2 zettabytes of data that exist in the digital universe and the 32.6 million servers in operation worldwide, a number that is growing at a rate of six times per year.

Conversely IT budgets are increasing at a rate of less than 0.8 percent per year, pressuring CIOs to do more with less, while the cost of running and maintaining the millions of servers far outweighs the amount spent on new equipment.”

How: “IBM has undertaken a huge operation to shrink its own infrastructure over the past 14 years. In 1997, Big Blue had 155 host datacentres, 80 web hosting centres, 31 networks and 15,000 applications. Today that’s been reduced to seven datacentres, five web hosts, a single network and 4,700 apps, leading to a saving of $4.1bn over the last five years, along with an 80 percent reduction in energy use.

Mills could not resist the opportunity to plug the mainframe, citing IBM’s 5.2GHz micro processor zEnterprise system as an ideal way of achieving IT consolidation.”

Full article on V3 here.