THINK! Servers don't matter, now more than ever . . .
Nothing new here then.
Smart infrastructure is just another fancy monicker for something akin to dynamic infrastructure or on demand. A marketing positioning concept name du jour that fits current times . . . .
To perhaps help win stimulus dollars.
Engineers have always been cleverly creating hybrid solutions, so what's so very new about this?
Perhaps Tom Bradicich and IBM STG x86 x64 server business are looking to to futures to try and change the game to help explain away their lack of market leadership and rapid progress in standard x86 and x64 servers against HP after such a very long time trying?
There's nothing like changing the groundrules and taking minds off the facts.
HP are king of this area and after a slow start besting IBM on blades after IBM's many and seemingly ongoing blade hiccups.
Though I do agree that we need several orders of magnitude of performance improvement, compute, store and communicate to resolve many real-time problems that the world would like to compute.
IBM GS have had great success with hybrid solutions approach and it helps to explain their continued success.
But there is a danger here, going all the way back to Watson's alleged early comment that there is probably only a market for six or so computers.
The moment that IBM think that servers themselves and the compute concept are unimportant and change their focus to hybrid as a get out clause is exactly the moment when they leave the door open of fortress IBM to a strong competitor or new technology upstart who can slip in and steal the iBM hegemony. IBM don't have a monopoly on thinking.
Just as in storage after an early start they yielded the storage market to the likes of EMC, Hitachi and the like. Word to be done and being done here.
Failure in too many key areas then begins to affect and effect business pull-through of hybrid solutions.
Ok so to be fair IBM are still the biggest (and fairest?) of them all but it only needs a slip as they did with Microsoft in a negotiation to create giant competitors who run off with the pie.
Hybrid and economies of scale aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Winning server focus and hybrids as tech is writ small and shrinking and applications growth widens may lead to great winning economies not diseconomies of scale.
Its still IBM and the 7 dwarves right now, and only the dwarves have changed . . . for now. . .