IBM realigns PC strategy: Think

IBM`s PC strategy is simple and can be summed up in one word: Think. Like the word, the strategy is a concise and simple way to ease the management of PCs and to ensure companies see a return on their investments.

Oliver Fortuin, IBM SA`s country manager of the PC division for South and Central Africa, says this new phase in the evolution of IBM computing will be driven by the ability to embrace open industry standards and provide innovation on top of them to solve real business problems.

Analysts estimate that 80% of the cost of a PC is in managing and supporting systems after its initial purchase. Think offers IBM customers a new set of innovations to drive down these IT support costs through simplifying the deployment of new technologies and the management of their PC base.

"The Think strategy is a means to rationalise numerous innovations into a more usable strategy for chief information officers and technology and business planners," says Fortuin.

"At one level, Think is a convenient way for us to pull together all of our PC products and services under one simple brand. And it allows us to align the PC business more tightly than ever before with the overall IBM strategy and lay the groundwork for PCs in an on-demand business environment.

"But, on a deeper, more meaningful level, Think sends a clear message to our customers that we are listening to them. For our customers, Think means that PCs from IBM will be simpler, more secure, more resilient, more flexible, more responsive, more autonomic. They won`t be an extension of the infrastructure, but an integral part of it," says Fortuin.

"At the heart of this strategy is a set of innovative technologies that address customer needs. Needs such as managing the cost of deploying end-user systems, implementing new technologies like wireless computing and ensuring that these technologies can be implemented securely."

These innovations include the recently announced autonomic computing initiative, which aims to make computers self-managing, self-healing, self-configuring, self-optimising and self-protecting. This reduces the need for support staff to constantly monitor them.

Other innovations include RapidRestore, announced today as part of ThinkVantage Technologies, and Distributed Wireless Security Auditor (DWSA). RapidRestore is a hassle-free one-button recovery solution that enables PC users to quickly and easily restore files or data, including applications and operating systems, and DWSA is a new security tool that uses client machines to continuously monitor for rogue 802.11 access points.

The Think strategy encompasses IBM`s vision of a changed world of business computing most recently articulated by CEO Sam Palmisano when he defined the next phase of e-business as "on-demand e-business".

An on-demand e-business is nearly intuitive in its ability to sense and respond to changes. It is highly responsive to the dynamic and unpredictable demands of customers, partners, suppliers and employees.

For this phase of e-business, one of the most important points Palmisano made about the technology is that companies will need a very different kind of IT infrastructure than they do today.

The IT infrastructure for an on-demand business must be integrated and utility-like, responsive, flexible and based on open standards. The products for this kind of end-to-end infrastructure have to be simpler, more secure, more resilient and use fewer resources.