By Boris Evelson

I know I am in the right business. Over 25 years ago, when I was a junior programmer on Wall Street, I heard the CEO of Citibank, Walter Wriston, say during one of the company meetings that “information about a transaction was going to become more important than a transaction itself”. I pondered on his prediction of the impending information revolution and decided to get into the business. I have not felt sorry ever since.

That is until now. I saw a good portion of my savings plan evaporate, some friends loosing their jobs on Wall Street in droves, and out of control media predicting, what basically amounts to, the end of the world (well, at least economic and social structures) as we know it.

What went wrong? While I am obviously not qualified to comment on the disastrous chain of events and a failure at every single link of the entire credit value chain (yes, I am not going to mention unreasonable social programs, uneducated consumers, greedy bankers and investors, ineffective risk rating agencies, and government regulation paralysis – did I miss anyone?), I am somewhat qualified to partially blame failed Business Intelligence at some levels of the credit value chain.

By Boris Evelson

I am appalled at what has been happening in the economy lately. Seems like we are moving from one crisis management to another. First it was the oil price increase crisis, now it’s the credit markets crisis, while the oil crisis seems to have disappeared. There are revolutionary approaches to solving these crises being thrown around very lightly and carelessly these days: nationalization of certain industries, redistribution of wealth and other extremist approaches. Haven’t we learned from history? Don’t we know by now that revolutions do not work? It’s been proven time and time again in Soviet Union, China, Cuba and many other nations that revolutions only lead to disasters: terror, holocausts, starvation, turning societies and social structures upside down, and people leading miserable existence. I know. I lived in one of those countries. I do not want to live in another country going through revolution.

The War for Mind Share In the Skies

The recent announcement of IBM’s Cloud Computing initiatives
represents the latest front in the marketing and delivery battle for
customers, partners, and ISV’s.  IBM has pulled together a mix of
existing technologies and new developments into a four pronged attack
that focuses on:

• Cloud service delivery to end customers -
  leveraging existing Lotus Collaboration technologies (e.g. Sametime
  Unyte) and the newly announced Bluehouse, a web-delivered social
  networking and collaboration cloud service.
• Customer integration of cloud services -
  delivering system integrator led practices around salesforce.com and
  Success Factors through IBM’s Global Business Services (GBS).
• ISV enablement of cloud services - providing ISV’s with tools to design, build, deliver, and market cloud services.
• Customer enablement of cloud services - helping customers deploy their own clouds through a suite of enabling technologies known as “Blue Cloud”.

Pricing Model Favorable to Broader ISV Adoption