IBM outlines $100m investment plan

IT heavyweight IBM has laid out a two-year, $100 million investment plan for 10 new businesses generated by InnovationJam.

Mark Harris, IBM SA's MD, says:" The local market will be a beneficiary of these new solutions. It is, however, still too early to determine which ones will be introduced, although we do see all of them applicable in the local market and the broader sub-Saharan African market."

InnovationJam is an online brainstorming session where innovators from around the world collaborate to create new ways of transforming business and society.

"This year, it brought together more than 150 000 people from 104 countries, including SA, and enjoyed the participation of stakeholders including IBM employees, family members, universities, business partners and clients from 67 companies."

He says InnovationJam was spread over two 72-hour sessions, which saw participants posting more than 46 000 ideas. Ten ideas were chosen in which IBM will invest to make them operational. The selected ideas are:

* Smart healthcare payment systems: Overhauling healthcare payment and management systems through the use of small personal devices (such as smart cards) that will automatically trigger financial transactions, the processing of insurance claims and the updating of electronic health records.
* Simplified business engines: Developing and bringing to market an intuitive, easy-to-use and pre-packaged set of Web 2.0 services and blade server offerings that allow small and mid-size businesses to easily tap applications customised to their own specific business needs.
* Real-time translation services: Offering advanced, real-time translation capabilities across major languages as a service for high-potential applications, industries and environments, such as healthcare, government and travel and transportation.
* Intelligent utility networks: Increasing the reliability and manageability of the world's power grids by building in "intelligence" in the form of real-time monitoring, control, analysis, simulation and optimisation.
* 3D Internet: Partnering with others to take the best of virtual worlds and gaming environments to build a seamless, standards-based 3D Internet - the next platform for global commerce and day-to-day business operations.
* Digital Me: Creating a secure, user-friendly service that simplifies storage, management and long-term access to the deluge of personal content that people accumulate (digital photos, videos, music, health and financial records, personal identification documents, files, etc).
* Branchless banking for the masses: Enabling existing and new financial institutions to profitably provide basic banking services (savings, payments, micro-lending) to often remote, inaccessible populations in fast-growing emerging markets.
* Integrated mass transit information system: Establishing on-demand systems for integrating, managing and disseminating real-time data for all of a municipality's or region's transit systems, optimising buses, rail, highways, waterways and airlines.
* Electronic health record system: Creating a standards-based infrastructure to support automatic updating of, and pervasive access to, personal healthcare records and the integrating of patient data with global payer/provider transaction systems.
* Big Green innovations: Launching a new business unit in IBM that will focus on applying the company's expertise and technologies to emerging environmental opportunities, such as advanced water modelling, water filtration via nanotechnology and efficient solar power systems.