IBM IOD 2010: Emerging tech, predicting the future and getting it right

We can't do it alone. If we're not open and working with everybody else out there, it's not going to happen. None of it continues unless we can show ROI for our customers and that's why everything we do is hand in hand. It used to be cool, technology for technology's sake, except it doesn't work anymore. That's why a lot of cool technologies went nowhere.

Have any changes come about as a result of customer interaction?

Customers are telling us that they want some different things for some of the social software that we saw for web sharing and conferencing. And we're still adjusting to what they want.

It was originally whiteboard sharing and that kind of thing. But, honestly, people got stale on that and it didn't take off. Now we're doing medical x-ray sharing so two doctors could be in different countries and be sharing x-rays. That's where it's at.

That has changed a little bit and it's customers that changed it. We brought it in and they said That's great, but'

Is there anything you're particularly proud of?

We brought SOA into IBM. Right now, people are asking how they can [make their tech] fit with these mobile devices and how they can extend their enterprise. And we've done it with customers and because they've used SOA, they can do it quickly.

So everybody that finally got on the SOA bandwagon should stand up and be proud! We were right. We said it's going to make things more flexible, you'll be able to change your enterprise.

Right now, we're trying to rephrase how people think of analytics because what we're doing is not traditional analytics in the way we all know it where you take a bulk of data that's at rest and analyse it and get the result.