Joe Gaeta

The 5th Annual Dancing for Joan is less than a month away!

2012-01-26T23:01:00.000-05:00

Saturday, February 25th @7pm. Marietta, Georgia.

Get your tickets or sponsorship packages today! Visit www.dancingforjoan.org.

Dancing for Joan is a festive evening of cocktails, dinner, great music, dancing, silent auction, and a “call to action” in the fight against lung cancer. It is a fun and exciting way to honor important contributors in the crusade and to raise the funds needed for research and awareness.

Read more about this event and The Joan Gaeta Lung Cancer Fund benefiting ALCMI here.

10 Steps to Effective Data Governance for SMBs #datagovernance

2012-01-23T11:38:00.000-05:00

by Maria C. Villar and Theresa C. Kushner

This article was originally published at Information-Management.com on January 11th, 2012
© 2012 Information Management and SourceMedia, Inc.

Data Governance is an emerging business priority. In a recent survey sponsored by IBM, two-thirds of all companies are implementing or planning to implement a data governance program in the next 18 months. Seventy percent see data governance growing in importance in the next three to five years.

This growing importance is supported by the business problems companies are experiencing and the high value they place on data governance solving these problems. While large companies are leading the way with data governance programs, the survey found half of smaller companies are involved or plan to be.

Yet, there is not a one-size-fits-all governance program for all companies. How should business leaders in medium and small companies implement a data governance program that is both effective and fits with the company’s size and resources?

The importance of data management and data governance is the first item business leaders need to understand in order to convince themselves, their managers and their employees of the need for improvement. In fact, the inability to communicate the value of managing data is a major obstacle for most companies, as cited in the survey. As a business leader in a medium-sized company, there are many management topics to tackle to ensure the company is financially successful and that customers, partners, employees and investors are satisfied. That is enough to keep business leaders busy, so why should they also care how the company’s important data is managed? Is that not the job of the technical and operations staff? The technical and operations staff should be involved in data management, but business leaders should be setting the priorities, rules and metrics to ensure the data supports the business needs.

Data errors cause significant business issues each year. Billing data quality issues result in millions of dollars in lost revenue. Embarrassing company communications to valued customers are caused by incorrect contact information such as names or gender. Data errors in financial reporting can cause penalties, financial restatements and incarcerations. Data security breaches can cause loss of confidence and broad negative press coverage. Sales forecasting inaccuracies can result in the company setting the wrong earnings expectations to the board or industry analysts. Many companies start data governance programs when data errors lead to these serious business issues. But why wait? Can any of this happen at your company? How confident are you that the important data in your company is accurate, complete and reliable for all the business processes served?

Similar to people management, capital management and product management, data management is a business driven function that manages another important asset: a company’s business data. Not all business data has the same value and, therefore, not all business data needs to be managed with strong business leader involvement. In practice, about 20-to-30 percent of a company’s business data is critical and strategic. Data governance is the data management activity that ensures the company’s most critical and strategic business data is acquired, created, updated, deleted and stored with proper processes, policies and people.

The 10 steps below offer medium-sized enterprises a practical approach for getting data management started.

Take a business-driven approach to data management by tying your data activities to key business drivers and company goals such as mergers and acquisitions, business intelligence, business process re-engineering and addressing company process pain points. From the results of the previously mentioned survey, one of the biggest barriers to implementation is that data governance has a lower priority than other programs. By combining data governance with other key business projects, you circumvent this barrier.
Gather the top business leaders in your company and agree on a collaborative, business-driven approach to the next four steps. Appoint a leader in your organization to lead the data governance program during the initial design phase and a forum for ongoing operational reviews. This is a great staff assignment for a talented manager in your company.
Decide on the most critical and strategic business data to manage. For example, customer account and contact information may be more important in a service-oriented business and product price list and inventory may be prized by manufacturing while data that impacts financial reporting will be critical for all companies.
Decide what is required from the data to support the business needs and the decisions to be made. How often will the data need to be acquired and refreshed? What level of quality is needed? Which fields are mandatory? How should the data be protected for regulation and privacy concerns? For example, medical offices have higher standards regarding client data than do restaurants or retail outlets.
Name those accountable for ensuring the data selected in step 3 meets all the business needs identified in step 4. Accountable parties could be selected by either the function or department where the data is first created or the function or department that will get the most value from managing the data. For example, the marketing function can be selected to manage customer contact information, focusing on all business needs for this information, not just the marketing function’s needs.
Decide how to measure success by meeting the data requirements in step 4. Possible metrics could include data quality levels to be achieved, timeliness of reports or compliance to regulatory standards. Consider also business benefit metrics such as goals for cost improvements, new revenue acquired from upselling or cross selling, manual steps eliminated and supplier efficiencies. Tying data governance improvements to business benefits keeps the business leaders engaged in the program because they see results that affect them.
Review metrics on an ongoing basis with the parties who are accountable. Manage your data as you would your personnel with quarterly reviews and annual assessments. Better yet, if company leaders are already reviewing key business metrics in an ongoing forum, extend the forum to include the data metrics.
Be actively involved in approving the policies, rules and standards associated with data use and management. A reasonable set of policies, rules and standards needs to be established by the accountable parties. These policies, rules and standards document to employees how the requirements are to be met in their everyday activities. Appropriate employee communication and training should also be scheduled. Business leaders should watch that these policies, rules and standards are reasonable, easy to implement and easy to understand, otherwise company employees will not follow them. All that is needed are a few effective data policies.
Hold your management teams accountable for complying to the data policies, rules and standards. Communicating and training employees on their data policies, rules and standards responsibilities will only go so far to ensure they are followed. Managers should hold employees accountable in their year-end evaluations, and managers should be held accountable for their team’s overall compliance. Accountable parties should report any exceptions to the department managers.
Fund the data management projects and resources. The data governance program may require a few specialized skills and IT capabilities in order to automate and monitor for success. The data governance program benefits outweigh the incremental cost of governance. Key business leaders should review the data governance program funding each year against the metrics achieved and metrics to be expected and fund accordingly.

With these 10 business actions, your technical team can enable data management policies, rules and metrics with technology. Data governance tools and technology can automate many of the data creation and update functions while ensuring data quality standards are met. Existing reporting tools can be extended to monitor and track key data fields and data governance activities. While data governance programs can be started with spreadsheets and manual monitoring, technology enables employees to be more productive and more predictable.

Once the initial design of your data governance program is established, business operation teams can define the operating procedures and staff the operating data roles. These same operation teams can also establish the ongoing metric reviews with the accountable parties and track issues and work items. As the leader in your company, these 10 practical steps will set the company on the path to effective data management and empower your employees to use their critical business data with confidence.

Maria C. Villar is a leader, consultant and writer in the field of enterprise information management, IT management and software development. She has held senior executive positions in both the technology and financial sector. Her information management accomplishments have been recognized by TDWI for best practices in data governance and business performance management. She has been recognized in Hispanic Business Magazine as one of the top 100 Influential Hispanics and received the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Award. Maria has guest lectured on the topic of IT and information management in leading universities, industry conferences and Fortune 500 companies across the country and is an instructor at E-learningCurve. She also co-authored a book with Theresa Kushner, “Managing your Business Data: From Chaos to Confidence.”

Theresa C. Kushner is director of customer intelligence at Cisco Systems. She is a journalist-turned-marketer who has spent her entire career in high tech marketing with Texas Instruments, IBM and Cisco Systems. Her team is responsible for data quality and business intelligence governance for worldwide marketing. Kushner has worked closely with IT throughout her career.

#IBM smashes Moore's Law, cuts bit size to 12 atoms

2012-01-18T21:17:00.000-05:00

Instead of just storing all your songs of a drive, breakthrough also will let you store all your videos

by Lucas Mearian
Originally published by Computerworld on January 12, 2012 (Computerworld)

IBM announced Thursday that after five years of work, its researchers have been able to reduce from about one million to 12 the number of atoms required to create a bit of data.

The breakthrough may someday allow data storage hardware manufacturers to produce products with capacities that are orders of magnitude greater than today's hard disk and flash drives.

"Looking at this conservatively ... instead of 1TB on a device you'd have 100TB to 150TB. Instead of being able to store all your songs on a drive, you'd be able to have all your videos on the device," said Andreas Heinrich, IBM Research Staff Member and lead investigator on this project.

Today, storage devices use ferromagnetic materials where the spin of atoms are aligned or in the same direction.

The IBM researchers used an unconventional form of magnetism called antiferromagnetism, where atoms spin in opposite directions, allowing scientists to create an experimental atomic-scale magnet memory that is at least 100 times denser than today's hard disk drives and solid-state memory chips.

The technology could also someday be applied to tape media.

While the science behind what IBM researchers accomplished is complex, the results are quite simple: They put a spin on the old adage that "opposites attract."

Instead today's method for magnetic storage where iron atoms are lined up with the same magnetic polarization, requiring greater distance between them, IBM created atoms with opposite magnetization, pulling them more tightly together.

"Moore's Law is basically the drive of the industry to shrink components down little by little and then solve the engineering challenges that go along with that but keeping the basic concepts the same. The basic concepts of magnetic data storage or even transistors haven't really changed over the past 20 years," Heinrich said. "The ultimate end of Moore's Law is a single atom. That's where we come in."

The researchers started with one iron atom and used the tip of scanning tunneling microscope to switch magnetic information in successive atoms. They worked their way up until eventually they succeeded in storing one bit of magnetic information reliably in 12 atoms. The tip of the scanning tunneling microscope was then used to switch the magnetic information in the bits from a zero to a one and back again, allowing researchers to store information.

Scanning tunneling microscope image of twelve iron atoms that were assembled into an atomically precise antiferromagnet (source: IBM Research)

IBM used iron atoms on copper nitrate to perform its experiments, but other materials could theoretically require even fewer atoms to store a bit of data.

The experiment was performed at low temperature: about 1 degree Kelvin, which corresponds to about -272 °C (-458 °F). The byte starts switching randomly about once a minute due to thermal energy (heat) at about 5 degrees Kelvin.

"We use low temperatures because it enables us to start from one atom and assemble bigger and bigger structures while keeping an eye on their magnetic properties. The more atoms we use to make each bit, the more stable the bits become. We anticipate that in order to make bits of this type that are stable at room temperature would require about 150 atoms per bit (rather than 12 atoms at low temperatures)," an IBM spokesman said.

The researchers then combined 96 atoms to make one byte of data, such as a letter or number. IBM then put many of the bytes together to create information. The first word they spelled using the new technique: THINK, which required five bytes of information or 480 magnetized atoms.

"The atomic scale magnetic data storage is orders of magnitude smaller than a single conventional bit," Heinrich said.

Heinrich is quick to point out that the breakthrough is more theoretical than practical at this point; storage manufacturers aren't going to build a storage devices that use a scanning tunneling microscope to switch bits back and forth to store data.

But the research proves storage mediums can be vastly denser than they are today.

"If you look at magnetic data storage element in a solid state device, like a spintronics device [also known as magnetoelectronics] or in a hard disk drive, you have about one million atoms in each bit," Heinrich said. "So you have a lot of leeway from where we currently are."

Miniaturized information storage in atomic-scale antiferromagnets. The binary representation of the letter 'S' (01010011) was stored in the Neel states of eight iron atom arrays (source: IBM Research)

Heinrich predicted that devices using IBM's new method of data storage would take five to 10 years to develop, but the research is critical in that it proves previous theoretical limits to data storage do not exist.

"Using iron atoms on a copper nitrite surface is probably far from being a real technology. You don't want to build this with the tool we're using, which is a research tool," he said. "You want to build this cheaply for a mass environment, and that's a huge engineering challenge."

Antiferromagnets is not the only data storage project that IBM is working on. Last year, the company produced its first Racetrack Memory circuit, which could also lead to silicon chips with the capacity of today's hard drives, but the durability and performance of flash drives. Henrich, however, said Racetrack technology falls somewhere between today's storage mediums and IBM's most recent antiferromagnets discovery.

T-H-I-N-K ... This figure shows the a magnetic byte imaged 5 times in different magnetic states. A white signal on the right edge corresponds to logic 0 (and is labeled as such) and a blue signal to logic 1. Between two successive images the magnetic states of the bits were switched to encode the binary representation of the ASCII characters "THINK" (source: IBM Research) to allow them to use antiferromagnetic structures as active elements and then solve the all the technological problems around that," Heinrich added.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian, or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

#IBM Gives Birth to Amazing E-mail-less Man #SocialBusiness

2012-01-16T09:29:00.000-05:00

by Robert McMillan

Originally published on Wired.com. 16 January 2012

When Luis Suarez decided to live in a world without e-mail, some of his colleagues thought he was making a mistake. After all, he works for IBM, one of the world’s top vendors of e-mail software.

IBM's Luis Suarez dumped e-mail four years ago. So far, he's shrunk his inbox by 98 percent. (Photo: Luis Suarez)

But Suarez was ready to cut the cord. Like any other 21st century white-collar worker, he was bombarded daily with around 40 e-mail messages. More than he wanted to answer.

Suarez — who cut his teeth in the 1990s at IBM’s mainframe tech support center in the Netherlands — is an affable guy. Four years ago, he was working on IBM’s BlueIQ social media team, helping IBM’s salesforce understand social media. It was a hot area, and people wanted to know more. Suarez had developed a reputation as one of IBM’s social media stars, and he was spending more time answering questions and delegating work via e-mail than he wanted. The questions kept coming, and privately, he was getting burned out. “I was getting tired of doing everyone else’s work instead of mine,” he says.

So in February 2008, he all but stopped sending e-mail. He didn’t wipe out his inbox. In fact, he still checks e-mail daily — it takes him about two minutes per day; most messages are internal meeting notifications — and he still uses it for sensitive one-on-one conversations. But for the most part, when people write him, he answers via social media and suggests that they’d be better off chatting via Twitter, Google+, or on Connections, IBM’s internal social network. The idea is that if more of his communication is in the open, he’ll spend less time communicating.

Luis Suarez is an extreme case. But he nicely represents the tech world’s gradual migration away from e-mail and onto social networks and other services. For many, services such as Facebook and Twitter have replaced e-mail, at least in part. Facebook has introduced e-mail addresses to encourage its more than 800 million users to keep their communication on its site, and even an old school tech giant like IBM is moving in this same direction.

Suarez may be the most famous IBMer to drop off the e-mail treadmill, but he isn’t the only one. He reckons that there are still several dozen colleagues who have done the same thing.

Juliana Leong is one of them. Like Suarez, she hasn’t totally done away with e-mail. But when coworkers send her a message, she replies with Connections. It’s more efficient, says Leong, a project manager with IBM’s Office of the CIO. Often, people who ask her questions in public get answers from Leong’s colleagues before she even gets a chance to read them. And those answers remain public, for others to see. That means there are fewer questions for Leong.

She says that her fellow IBMers are paying attention to Suarez.

“He’s a very prominent person in the social community in IBM, so a lot of people like to follow his example,” she says. Exactly how effective they’ve been, Leong doesn’t know, but her office has made reducing e-mail a focus for 2012.

So four years into his brave experiment, Suarez is looking less like a crazy man on an island. (He literally lives on an island: Grand Canary Island, which he moved to a few years ago. He loves the “beaches, sun, and mountains.”) He’s looking more like a visionary.

Carbon Copy? Are You Kidding Me?

Last year, European technology services giant Atos said that it wants to get rid of e-mail by 2014 and a few weeks ago Volkswagen said it was going to turn off BlackBerry e-mail access to some staffers during non-work hours.

When IBM’s new CEO Ginni Rometty released her first message to company employees earlier this month, she posted a video to Connections, rather than sending out a corporate e-mail blast.

Facebook is trying to move users to its own messaging service, something that goes beyond e-mail and instant messages. E-mail alone is too slow, and archaic, according to Molly Graham, who works with Facebook’s mobile group. “Look at that line that we use every day called CC. What does CC even stand for? It stands for carbon copy, which is insane,” she said in November at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara. “What does that even mean in today’s world’

“When we were doing research for our messaging product, we actually looked at what subject lines people used. And like 80 percent of subject lines are “hey,” “hi,” or left blank. The subject line is outdated. The truth is, e-mail is outdated.”

Though he’s IBM’s poster boy for dropping out of e-mail, even Suarez admits that the inbox and carbon-copy will probably never completely go away. But four years into his experiment, he feels more productive, and almost all of his work is done in the open.

For Suarez, it’s not just more efficient. It’s a nicer way to communicate. There’s a “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” kind of passive-aggressiveness to the way many people use corporate e-mail, with the strategic bcc and the cover-your-ass e-mail message. “If you have been using e-mail in a corporate environment, you know that plenty of people use e-mail as a weapon against their own colleagues,” he says. “This was also creating a new way of working where you wouldn't need to justify the work you did. You earned trust from your colleagues by being a lot more public, a lot more open and a lot more transparent in what you do.”

And there’s one more thing. Suarez has lost about 50 pounds since 2008, a feat he at least partially credits to his e-mail aversion. “Since I’m no longer spending much time on e-mail during the day I’ve come up with other things to do,” he says.

#Cancer Treatment: Are Personalized Molecular Profiles in Our Future?

2012-01-14T10:52:00.001-05:00

From PBS NewsHour...

In the 40 years since the federal government promised to find a cure for cancer, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent and much has been learned. Still, the diseases continue to claim more lives each year. Health correspondent Betty Ann Bowser reports on the past, present and future of cancer treatment here.

#IBM Breaks U.S. Patent Record; Tops Patent List for 19th Straight Year

2012-01-12T10:39:00.000-05:00

IBM inventors received more than 6,000 patents in 2011

ARMONK, N.Y. - 11 Jan 2012: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it set a new U.S. patent record in 2011, marking the 19th consecutive year that the company has led the annual list of patent recipients. IBM inventors earned a record 6,180 U.S. patents in 2011, more than quadrupling Hewlett-Packard’s issuances and exceeding by six times those of Oracle/Sun.

More than 8,000 IBMers residing in 46 different U.S. states and 36 countries are responsible for the company's record-breaking 2011 patent tally. IBM inventors who reside outside the U.S. contributed to more than 26% of the company's 2011 patents.

Read all about it here: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/36463.wss#release

#SmarterSoftware to build a #SmarterPlanet

2012-01-06T00:14:00.001-05:00

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/

Check out my IBM page at ibm.com/myrep/jagaeta

You need Smarter Software to build a Smarter Planet. IBM Software: Expert. Open. Ready.

To learn more, call me today at 770-863-1493 or send an e-mail to jagaeta@us.ibm.com.

Dancing for Joan presented by Northside Hospital Cancer Care

2011-12-09T16:40:00.001-05:00

The Joan Gaeta Lung Cancer Fund is very excited to announce the Northside Hospital Cancer Care Program as our first Hummingbird Sponsor for 2012!

Please join Northside Hospital, Paul Scheinberg of Saint Joseph's Hospital, and TV's Nancy Grace in the fight against lung cancer!

Come Dancing for Joan on February 25th! Learn more at www.dancingforjoan.org.

Home Security System Recommendation

2011-12-01T14:21:00.001-05:00

Metro Atlanta Residents: If you are in the market for a new home security system, please consider Ackerman Security. You can contact Michael Sorrells directly at 678-776-9309 or michael.sorrells@ackermansecurity.com.

I just switched from ADT. Ackerman has high quality service and, in most cases, uses the same equipment (no new installation). And all at almost 1/2 the monthly cost!

Again, if you are in the market, call Michael at 678-776-9309. Nice guy. Prompt. His analysis and estimate took no time at all.

Application-Specific Licensing FAQs [#ISV #IBMPartners]

2011-11-29T15:05:00.001-05:00

Q: What is ASL?
A: Application-Specific License is a business model available to IBM Business Partners in which the partner purchases IBM licensed products to bundle into their solution(s). The partner purchases the licenses directly from IBM. The IBM licenses are restricted for use only within the partner’s total solution and are sold as part of the partner’s solution - not as part of separate agreement, such as under the resell model. The partner retains ownership of the IBM license and provides Level 1 and Level 2 support to its customers.

Q: What types of Business Partners are eligible ASL Partners?
A: ASL partners are partners who have applications or solutions that they develop and sell to their customers. The IBM components are a part of the total solution they provide. The types of partners that offer these types of solutions include:

Independent Software Vendors (ISVs)
Systems Integrators (SIs )
Technology Partners
Application, platform and infrastructure service providers
Application Developers

Q: Why Would an IBM Business Partner want to leverage the ASL model?
A: Business partners get the following benefits from the ASL model:

To their clients – the ASL partner can deliver IBM software along with their solutions in one contract. Clients want a bundled solution with a single point of contact.
ASL partners want to manage the entire client relationship including technical support.
ASL contracts allow the partner to ship worldwide.
ASL partners want either fixed price or declining price over the contract life.
Clients get up and running faster with pre-bundled middleware stack.
ASL partners reduce their development/training costs using IBM software.

Q: Can an ASL Partner also be a reseller or another type of Partner?
A: Yes. ASL is not a type of partner, but rather a contracting option a business partner chooses to use to distribute IBM software. For example, an ISV is the type of partner. ASL is the type of contract they sign. That same ISV can also be a reseller.

Q: Are ASL and OEM the same?
A: No. ASL (Application-Specific License) is based on the foundation of the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) business model. We differentiate ASL and OEM in the following ways:

The Application-Specific License (ASL) model enables partners to bundle IBM software into their solutions with the partner's brand; the IBM software could be visible to the end user client. This new, simplified, ASL model enables partners to deliver a complete, bundled solution with negotiated pricing based on their terms, worldwide.
OEM is typically a model where a Technology Partner deeply embeds IBM middleware into a hardware appliance like a cell phone, ATM machine, or even a car. The end user doesn't know that they are using IBM software in the solution.

Q: How do ASL partners buy IBM software?
A: ASL partners buy their licenses directly from IBM ASL sales reps.

Q: Why does the end user benefit from buying the IBM sw from the ASL partner?
A: The end user buys a complete partner solution, not software "piece parts". Thus, the end user has a single point-of-contact rather than having to call multiple vendors for support. Moreover, there is only one contract to sign.

Q: Where can a partner or a prospective partner get information on ASL?
A: Contact Joe Gaeta at 770-863-1493 or jagaeta@us.ibm.com.

Sam Palmisano's legacy of leadership at IBM

2011-11-18T11:01:00.000-05:00

Sam Palmisano's legacy of leadership at IBM - Fortune Management

Fight the Stigma! #lungcancer

2011-11-16T09:32:00.001-05:00

Dr. David Carbone, Director of Specialized Program of Research Excellence in Lung Cancer at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, addresses the smoking stigma associated with lung cancer patients. He is quick to point out that many with lung cancer have never smoked and some did the right thing by quitting a long time ago. He notes that patients suffering from other types of cancer as well as coronary artery disease, typically, are not blamed for causing their illness the same way lung cancer patients have been.

November is Lung Cancer Awareness Month. Spread the word.

www.forjoan.org

Another ASL Success [#ISV #IBMCoud]

2011-11-15T10:57:00.001-05:00

IBM DB2 Database Software Now Available For ISVs On GoGrid’s Cloud Infrastructure

Originally published on DailyMarkets.com.

GoGrid, a leading cloud infrastructure company, today announced that a GoGrid Server Image with IBM(R) DB2(TM) database software is now available to help independent software vendors (ISVs) build DB2 powered applications on the cloud in minutes.

With GoGrid’s new, unique, advanced billing and license management technology, ISVs can create solutions using multiple value-add applications and provide customers with a consolidated monthly invoice that includes GoGrid’s infrastructure, DB2 and any additional ISV license fees. This process enables ISVs to deliver their software in the cloud, improve their end customer experience through fast, seamless deployment and gain broad marketability across GoGrid’s user base community.

“For our ISVs, simplifying IT infrastructure and deploying applications securely and seamlessly is a very compelling value proposition,” said Mark Worsey, executive vice president of Technology, GoGrid. “Making DB2 available on the GoGrid Exchange is a great step in delivering on the real value of cloud computing. DB2 is ideally suited for cloud environments and combined with GoGrid’s partner exchange platform, ISVs benefit from a seamless process for deploying DB2-based solutions rapidly while only charging their customers only for what they actually consume.”

GoGrid entered an application specific licensing agreement with IBM to deploy DB2 on the GoGrid Exchange. A major advantage is the unique billing and license management system that enables end-customers to receive a consolidated GoGrid invoice each month that covers infrastructure, IBM and ISV license fees. ISVs also have the option to pay for IBM licenses directly through GoGrid or pass the fees on directly through to the customer. ISVs then receive recurring revenue payments for their software in the mail.

“The DB2 GoGrid Server Image is a great example of how GoGrid is lowering the barrier of entry for software providers interested in expanding their businesses with cloud solutions,” said Jeffrey Samuels, Chief Marketing Officer, GoGrid. “DB2 combined with GoGrid’s billing and licensing system opens up an exciting new business opportunity. We are enabling ISVS to better service the needs of their clients by offering trusted IBM software with the scalability and flexibility of a cloud-based business model.”

The GoGrid Exchange is a diverse marketplace of cloud solutions where partner-created images are sold, bought or shared across the GoGrid community. The GoGrid Exchange provides ISVs with a simple process for cloud-enabling their existing software applications while also protecting their intellectual property. With the GoGrid Exchange, customized partner images are listed in a catalog that customers can browse and select software and solutions they want to include when provisioning their virtual machines. Because partner images can be provisioned in minutes, customers can drastically reduce the time it takes to get new applications and solutions up and running in the cloud.

For more information on how to leverage this new IBM DB2 Server Image on GoGrid, please visit: http://go.gogrid.com/IBM-ISV.

For more information on IBM's Application-Specific Licensing program, contact Joe Gaeta today at jagaeta@us.ibm.com or 770-863-1493.

#IBM Business Partners Driving Results #ISV #PartnerWorld #Software

2011-11-07T16:07:00.003-05:00

With the help of IBM, Business Partners are driving results for their clients on a Smarter Planet.

Learn more at: https://www.ibm.com/engines. Find an IBM Business Partner here. Learn about how to become an IBM partner via the ASL model by calling me today at 770-863-1493.

Tweet chat with @forjoan, @rockscarlove, @bonniejaddario about lung cancer. 11/9 @ 9pm EST #rockscarchat

2011-11-04T11:35:00.000-04:00

On Wednesday, November 9th at 9pm EST, friend of the lung cancer cause,@RockScarLove, will host a live "Tweet Chat" about lung cancer in honor of Lung Cancer Awareness Month.

@BonnieJAddario and @forJoan will be fielding questions regarding the current state of testing, misconceptiosn about lung cancer and it stigma, and other questions pertaining tothe #1 cancer killer in the world.

So, mark your calendars! Grab a cup of coffee and your laptop or iPad and join us on November 9th at 9pm!

Instructions to join the conversation...

1. Go to www.TweetChat.com
2. Sign in with your Twitter ID and password
3. Enter "rockscarchat" after the hashtag (#).
4. Join the conversation.

If you don't have a Twitter account, you can still follow the conversation at TweetChat.com. Simply enter "rockscarchat" after the hashtag (#) without signing in.

It's time to take on #lungcancer. Join the fight.

2011-11-02T15:49:00.002-04:00

http://www.lungcancerleaders.org

Thank you to the Leaders of the Lung Cancer-Free World for producing this powerful video.

Learn more here.

November is #LungCancer Awareness Month!

2011-11-01T13:04:00.002-04:00

Learn the facts! Such as: Lung cancer kills more people than breast, prostate, colon, liver, kidney, and melanoma cancers combined.

Fight the Stigma! Lung cancer matters, too. Nobody deserves it. And, you do not have to smoke to get it. It's time to deal with it beyond its connection to smoking: "If we took all the smokers in the world, only about 10% of them would ever develop lung cancer." - Dr. Bradley Lash, Lankenau Medical Center, Philadelphia, PA

Join the fight! Find a Lung Cancer Walk in your area and participate. In Atlanta, there are two during November. Also, get your tickets now for our 5th Annual Dancing for Joan in February! (With emcee Nancy Grace of "Dancing with the Stars"!) We also have sponsorship opportunities available.

Spread the word! Social media...e-mail...in person...whatever it takes!

IBM ASL Partner Spotlight: Sky Solutions [#ISV #ASL #IBM #Software]

2011-10-31T14:48:00.002-04:00

Sky Solutions integrates IBM Information Management and IBM Business Analytics products into the solution to deliver a high performing, reliable solution out of the box. They provide business-ready business intelligence solutions for supply chain and banking

Sky Solutions's offereings consist of a strategic implementation roadmap methodology, a business KPI repository and pre-constructed performance management deliverables (scorecards, dashboards, analytics, and reports). Their "competition" are companies that build their own solutions from scratch.

Sky Solutions integrates IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence, IBM InfoSphere Datastage, IBM InfoSphere Warehouse, IBM DB2 Workgroup Server into their offering.

Benefits of ASL realized by Sky Solutions:

Accelerated Time-to-Result
Lower implementation cost
Faster business results
Assured Business Value
Alignment to Corporate Goals
Proven ROI
Increase Business Effectiveness
Proactive Management
One Procurement Source for the Whole Solution

Learn more about Sky Soltuions at www.skysolutions.com.

Learn how an ASL agreement with IBM software can help you by calling me today at 770-863-1493.

More Than Facebook: The Time Is Right For Social Business - Forbes

2011-10-31T12:13:00.001-04:00

More Than Facebook: The Time Is Right For Social Business - Forbes

I recommend SquareTrade.

2011-10-27T20:11:00.000-04:00

Learn more by clicking here.

Jill Costello, lost at 22 to #LungCancer, receives NCAA 2012 "Inspiration Award"

2011-10-26T19:16:00.000-04:00

Read about it on "Blogging for Joan", here.

"Don't accept inevitable" [#IBM #Cloud #Software #SmarterPlanet #ASL]

2011-10-26T09:19:00.001-04:00

Longtime executive Ginni Rometty will replace Sam Palmisano as president and CEO of IBM starting early next year. She spoke to Fortune minutes after the announcement.

Originally published on CNN Money (A Service of CNN, Fortune, and Money) on October 25, 2011 at 6:07 PM ET.

IBM has a new chief. Longtime executive Ginni Rometty will replace Sam Palmisanoas president and CEO starting January 1. Having put in 30 years at the company and survived IBM's (IBM) near death experience in the early 1990s, Rometty literally bleeds blue. She has worked closely with Palmisano during his successful nine-year tenure, and she gets credit for heading up the company's growth strategy by getting IBM into cloud computing and the analytics business. Earlier this evening, Rometty spoke with Fortune senior writer Jessi Hempel.

FORTUNE: What are your priorities going to be? Rometty: You're not going to be surprised given that part of my role is strategy and together with my colleagues we built the current strategy. My priorities are going to be to continue to execute the strategy we built and the 2015 roadmap. I was an integral part of building it.

FORTUNE: Will Sam continue to be involved? Sam will continue as chairman. He'll continue to help me with, well, anything I ask him to.

FORTUNE: Could you point to the most important thing you've learned from working with Sam? That's a good question. I've thought a lot about this and the biggest thing I think Sam taught me -- but I also think that he taught it to the whole company during this time -- can be summed up in a quote: "Don't accept inevitable." That means, you've got to keep reinventing. That, to me, is the greatest gift he's given IBM, this ability to continually reinvent itself. We're in an industry in which you constantly have to make new markets. That's what we are doing with Smarter Planet, analytics, the cloud. Those are all about making markets.

FORTUNE: As you look forward, in the competitive landscape we've seen some big shifts among your competitors in the last year, is there anything that will be particularly important or does this change anything for IBM in the year to come? No. Our strategy is firm and is very different. We're enterprise, we're not consumer. We're very focused on high value. We're focused on research and development and innovation. We've taken a long view. And maybe above all, we are very focused on value for clients.

FORTUNE: More than any other company in the field, IBM has always emphasized taking a long view. You talk about the 2015 roadmap; are you at work on a roadmap after that?
Not yet. We're at work on delivering on that one. 2015 is still a long way out for us. There are a lot of things we don't know yet. We're hard at work at that. What does have a longer horizon, though, is research and development. We are absolutely working on things that are longer term there, whether that's big data, analytics, the commercialization of Watson. That to me is a very important differentiator between us and others.

FORTUNE: You'll continue your same levels of investment in R and D? Absolutely. We've been unwavering on those for a decade. It's one thing to spend, the second thing is what you spend on. We're fixated on a business-driven technology agenda.

FORTUNE: What do you mean by that? It means not just technology for technology's sake. It means technology that can have an effect on the world. Take, for example, Watson. I believe Watson will reshape healthcare around the world in our lifetime.

FORTUNE: Does "business-driven" mean moving science -- more quickly than in decades past -- to commercialization? That is one manifestation. It also means that you're appealing to decision makers and new buyers who are business oriented. So, a chief marketing officer for example. We've just announced -- and this is another example of making a market -- a new category around smarter commerce, clearly one of the big target audiences is the chief marketing officer, one of the most underserved in the marketplace.

FORTUNE: Thank you so much. Thanks.

Jaspersoft Announces New Hadoop-Based Big Data Analytics Solution | #ISV #Software #ASL #BI #InfoSphere

2011-10-25T16:26:00.001-04:00

New solution combines leading BI technology with IBM's Hadoop-powered offering to address Big Data Analytics.

This press release orginally published on prnewswire.com.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 24, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Jaspersoft, maker of the world's most widely used business intelligence (BI) software, today announced it is joining with IBM in the Big Data space. Jaspersoft will work with IBM to deliver a solution that combines IBM's enterprise-class, Hadoop-based product, InfoSphere BigInsights, with Jaspersoft's full BI suite to provide a complete reporting and management solution to meet customers' significant-volume data needs.

With the increasing amount of data in companies today, there is an opportunity to extract high value from it inside and outside of the organization. In fact, Forrester Research estimates that firms currently utilize less than 5 percent of their available data; Big Data enables firms to affordably access the other 95 percent. While these data sets are characterized by their very large volume, velocity, and variety of information; using the right tools, they can yield new insights for greater business value. Through its new partnership around Big Data, Jaspersoft is integrating and licensing IBM InfoSphere BigInsights through an Application Specific Licensing Agreement. Jaspersoft for InfoSphere BigInsights combines the power of IBM's analytics platform to manage, analyze and provide deep insight into Big Data with Jaspersoft's capability to extract key information using flexible and easy-to-use reporting, dashboard and analytics views in one integrated solution, enabling competitive advantage.

Jaspersoft provides a truly native reporting solution that can connect directly to IBM InfoSphere BigInsights through HBase as well as Hive. This means that with Jaspersoft, businesses can perform interactive ad hoc reporting and analysis directly on data stored in Hadoop without having to load this data into another database as is the case with other BI vendors. Fully integrated with IBM's InfoSphere BigInsights platform, Jaspersoft's BI suite provides BigInsights users with plug-and-play access to their organization's data and the ability to combine this information with a wide range of other internal and external sources, including web and SaaS-based data sources.

Karl Van den Bergh, Vice President of Product and Alliances at Jaspersoft said, "We're pleased to be partnering with IBM to deliver an industry-leading solution that combines cost-effective and flexible business intelligence with Internet-scale data management capabilities. Together, we can meet the Big Data Analytics needs of any size organization."

Bruce Weed, Program Director, Big Data Business Development at IBM said, "Jaspersoft provides a powerful and flexible reporting and analysis solution, and is a key part of our rich ecosystem in the Big Data space. In addition, Jaspersoft's community of a quarter million members will help us further address and solve problems within the Big Data space."

Key features of the solution:

The full Jaspersoft BI Suite including ETL, pixel-perfect and ad hoc reporting, dashboards, and analysis with native connectors to IBM InfoSphere BigInsights through HBase and Hive
Job and workflow management, provisioning and advanced security, large-scale indexing and text analysis through IBM InfoSphere BigInsights
Available as a free/community version and a commercial version with more advanced features

For more information on the Jaspersoft and IBM Big Data Analytics solution, listen to the replay of the joint IBM and Jaspersoft webinar held on October 12. To listen to the webinar, please click here.

Online Resources

About Jaspersoft
Jaspersoft provides the most flexible, cost effective and widely deployed business intelligence suite in the world, enabling better decision-making through highly interactive web-based reports, dashboards and analysis. Leveraging a commercial open source business model, Jaspersoft provides end-to-end BI capabilities at a fraction of the cost of other vendors. The BI suite includes pixel-perfect enterprise reporting, ad hoc query, dashboards, OLAP and in-memory analysis, and data integration. Jaspersoft is the only BI vendor that enables companies to adapt to the new, virtualized world by providing a complete spectrum of on-premise, multi-tenant SaaS and cloud-based deployment options for both embedded and standalone business intelligence. Unlike traditional BI vendors, Jaspersoft is built on a modern, lightweight, standards-based architecture and offers greater vendor independence thanks to its open source codebase. Unlike niche BI vendors, Jaspersoft represents a safe choice with tens of thousands of production deployments across a wide range of industries.

Jaspersoft's open source business intelligence software has nearly 14 million product downloads worldwide, 175,000 production deployments and over 14,000 commercial customers in 100 countries. Its BI suite is advanced regularly by a development community of nearly 240,000 registered members. For more information visit: http://www.jaspersoft.com and http://www.jasperforge.org.

Note: Jaspersoft is a trademark of Jaspersoft Corporation. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Media Contact
Jasmine Teer
LEWIS Pulse PR for Jaspersoft
jasmine.teer@lewispulse.com
+1 (415) 321-2348

SOURCE Jaspersoft

RELATED LINKS
http://www.jaspersoft.com
http://www.ibm.com/partnerworld/asl-oem

Get Started on Your Path to Become a #Cloud Service Provider with IBM SmartCloud and #ASL. #ISV #ASP #SaaS

2011-10-19T12:07:00.000-04:00

Learn more about IBM Application-Specific Licensing and how it pertains to the cloud.

Contact me today! jagaeta@us.ibm.com | (770) 863-1483 | www.ibm.com/myrep/jagaeta

IBM Application-Specific Licensing: A Discussion #ISV #Cloud #Developer

2011-10-18T14:23:00.000-04:00

As I discuss what Application-Specific Licensing (ASL) is and what its value is, I will do so in the context of the potential value to you and to your customers.

ASL is an IBM licensing vehicle that enables you to deliver your solution bundled with IBM software - at a fixed price and under one contract - to your customers anywhere in the world and supported by your organization from end-to-end.

IBM knows that delivering a total solution to your customers makes good business sense for you as well as them. By bundling proven, industry-leading IBM software into your solution, you provide your customers with all the software necessary to deploy, run, and manage your application.

How ASL can help you meet your business goals...

Based on IBM's experience, the following are common goals of ISVs.

First and foremost, our partners want to be more profitable. Some ways to achieve this include increasing revenue, developing a faster time to market, and leveraging IBM brand equity.

Revenue and Profitability

We know that this can be a challenge if you do not know how much the third party solution components will cost. By knowing this, you can price your solution so that you get a margin that increases your profits. An ASL contract gives you that known, fixed cost. An additional benefit of purchasing IBM software through an ASL contract is that you make a profit on the IBM software component, as well as on your solution.

Faster Time to Market

By bundling IBM software with your application, you reduce your development time - and development costs. Furthermore, by using IBM software, you can reduce your investment risk by focusing on the areas of application development where you have core expertise.

Brand Equity

By including IBM software in your solution, you leverage the IBM brand - a known value to customers globally.

Some additional ways to achieve your goal of increased revenue are by utilizing the IBM ecosystem, maintaining high customer satisfaction, and reducing your sales cycle.

Ecosystem

Leverage IBM PartnerWorld to connect with other partners. Partners can download marketing materials and templates, participate in co-marketing programs, get technical support, and us the local IBM Innovation Centers (IICs) for customer meetings. Partners also get the ability to leverage IBM's global marketing campaign themes, such as IBM Smarter Planet.

Customer Satisfaction

Maintain and increase high customer satisfaction by delivering a proven solution that is easily deployed and easily maintained with single source of support.

Reduce Sales Cycle

You are the single point of contact on the sale. There is only one contract - your contract - for all the components needed to run the solution.

Some examples of how the IBM ASL agreement

has helped some other ISVs.

STORServer

STORServer needed to bring to market their STORServer Backup Appliance. They found that bundling IBM Tivoli Storage Manager into their backup appliance helps them penetrate markets they hadn't been able to address in the past.

STORServer needed custom pricing to penetrate the SMB customer market. Through the IBM ASL agreement, they were able to do just that.

Leveraging ASL not only helped with pricing, but it also helped STORServer attract new customers as a result of IBM's brand recognition in SMB.

Delivery Options

An ERP ISV wanted to offer their existing and prospective clients their solution hosted on the Cloud. They determined a hosted offering would provide the flexible licensing options and scalability their clients needed. The ISV selected IBM software because it was the right technical fit and they selected ASL because it offered the right licensing fit.

The ISV was able to quickly attract a customer. The customer needed to deploy an ERP system to meet the demands of its new growth strategy, but was concerned about the high deployment cost of that system.

The company selected the ERP ISV because it had a hosted solution (on premises / off premises), and as such, it aligned with their cost and cash-flow pressures.

The result? The ISV was able to establish a new route to market which, in turn, grew their business. The customer was able to immediately deploy their market growth strategy and, only three months after, landed a large sale that resulted in a five-fold expansion of their operation.

In Summary

ASL provides you with the ability to:

Bundle IBM software with your solution.
Leverage your discount to price your solution to maximize profit.
Sell the total solution under ONE contract to your customers anywhere in the world.

All of this will help you to:

Get to market faster.
Sell into new markets.
Expand your ecosystem.
Maintain customer satisfaction.
Reduce your sales cycle.

I hope you can see the value that an ASL contract can provide to you and how it can help your meet your goals.

Contact me today to further discuss how ASL can help your organization.

jagaeta@us.ibm.com
(770) 863-1493

Secure your sponsorship today! 5th Annual Dancing for Joan, benefiting lung cancer research and awareness is set for Sat., Feb 25, 2012.

2011-10-10T21:01:00.000-04:00

On Saturday, February 25th, 2012, we will gather at the Pavilion East Cobb in Marietta, Georgia for the 5th Annual Dancing for Joan Dinner and Gala.

The Joan Gaeta Lung Cancer Fund invites you to

become an official sponsor of Dancing for Joan.

This festive evening of cocktails, dinner, great music and dancing, silent auction, and a “call to action” in the fight against lung cancer is an event not to be missed.

The Joan Gaeta Lung Cancer Fund was created in the fall of 2007 by her husband and children to raise awareness of the disease, to educate the public and to be an advocate for research. We also strive to eliminate the stigma of lung cancer and to support survivors and their loved ones in our local community.

Our ultimate goal: to eradicate lung cancer. To that end, we became an affiliate of The Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation in 2010 - specifically dedicated to raising money their research arm, The Addario Lung Cancer Medical Institute (ALMCI).

Please visit us at www.forjoan.org for detailed information on this partnership or visit www.alcmi.net to see how this research is going to change the paradigm for lung cancer research.

There is so much to celebrate this year and yet so much to do. We would be honored to have you join us in our work as a sponsor of Dancing for Joan.

Please review our 2011 sponsorship opportunities here.

Thank you for your consideration – we want to effect this change in the memory of all those who have lost their battle with lung cancer as Joan Gaeta did...and also to honor all those currently fighting lung cancer and those yet to be diagnosed.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to call me directly at (404) 435-7376, or send an e-mail to gaetafund@gmail.com.

Look Software Press Release: Look Software Bundles #IBM RPG Open Access FREE with Their Products

2011-10-03T16:29:00.000-04:00

For Immediate Release
Melbourne, Australia – 29 September, 2011
http://www.mcpressonline.com/software-news/development-tools-utilities/looksoftware-bundles-ibm-rpg-open-access-free-with-products.html

looksoftware today announced that they will bundle IBM’s Rational Open Access: RPG Edition for free with every purchase of looksoftware’s Open Access products, having recently signed an agreement to distribute the software.

IBM i community interest in Open Access was ranked #1 in an independent 2010 market survey, and this move by looksoftware makes it even easier to get started with the technology. looksoftware will now provide a package that includes all of the components required to OA-enable existing applications or develop new applications using OA, and blend them seamlessly with non-OA applications.

looksoftware CEO Brendan Kay commented “Simplicity is one of our core values at looksoftware – we aim to shield our customers from the unnecessary complexity of using new technologies, and the requirement to purchase Rational Open Access separately has been causing unneeded confusion. In providing the product for free with every purchase of our Open Access products, our aim is to reduce the difficulty and cost of getting up and running with OA.”

Released in March this year, looksoftware’s Open Access support integrates directly with their existing developer tools, and delivers an infinite number of interfaces from a single modernization effort. Crucially however, developers have the ability to define and control every element and property of the graphical interface dynamically from the RPG code, removing the constraints of 5250 to deliver truly native interfaces.

Kay added “Our tools have delivered state of the art interfaces for the last 15 years, however Open Access enables us to go one step deeper and provide direct access to the interface from the RPG code. Our IDE will always be available to fine-tune the interface, but the resultant architecture will leave the DDS in the standard IBM format, as opposed to the vendor-specific nature of alternative architectures. If choosing to take advantage of Open Access leaves you locked to one vendor, then it won’t be very open”

IBM has endorsed the decision to package Rational Open Access with looksoftware’s support. ASL Account Manager Joe Gaeta commented “IBM is pleased to welcome looksoftware to the IBM Rational ASL program. We appreciate looksoftware’s efforts to promote application modernization with the integration of Rational products into its own solutions.”

For more information on looksoftware’s support for RPG Open Access, please access looksoftware's product page or contact: looksoftware in Australia at + 61 3 9535 4444 or looksoftware in the USA at + 1 678 354 1094. Alternatively email marketing@looksoftware.com or visit their website at www.looksoftware.com

Where The Heck Is IBM?

2011-09-29T15:12:00.000-04:00

by Gene Marks
Originally published at Forbes.com on 9/13/11.

All those well-known technology companies sure had a busy summer, didn’t they?

Microsoft bought Nokia’s phone business, purchased Skype and released its online version of Office. Google bought Motorola’s phone division. Apple announced a new version of its iPhone and saw its iconic CEO retire. Facebook teamed up with Skype and now values itself at more than $80 billion. LinkedIn had a successful public offering. HP killed off its cell phone business and is now hinting it’ll do the same for its PC business. They want to focus on software and services. Like IBM.

Wait…who? IBM? Where the heck have they been?

Well, let’s see.

Just this week it was announced that WellPoint, one of the country’s largest insurers, will be using IBM’s super-computer “Watson” to help doctors figure out how to treat diseases. IBM? For some reason I never seem to hear much about them in the news. Besides Watson unfairly trouncing humans on Jeopardy, one could ask if IBM even exists nowadays. Are they still even a player in today’s technology industry?

This year, IBM celebrates its 100^th birthday. In last year’s Fortune 500 list of top American companies, IBM was ranked #18 with revenues of $99.9 billion. That was more than the revenues of Google (#92) and Apple (#35) combined. Microsoft, by comparison, was ranked #38 with $62.5 billion in revenues. In 2010 IBM was the seventh most profitable company in the country (Microsoft was fourth and Apple was eighth.) By 2015, IBM expects to add about $30 billion more in annual revenues…a 30% growth forecast in just four years. By comparison, the U.S. economy is projected to grow 1%.

Here’s more: at the beginning of September, IBM was the fourth highest valued company by market cap in the U.S. (Apple and Microsoft were both valued higher). IBM’s market cap at the time was $199.4 billion. Google’s was $169.4 billion. Cisco was $85.8 billion. Since January 1 of this year, the company’s stock price has risen 11% while the Dow has fallen 5%.

What’s strange is that not only do I never really read that much about IBM but my clients don’t seem to buy any of their products. I’ve never worked with an IBM employee or consultant. I don’t sell their software. I’ve never done business with them. I don’t use their products. Or have I?

IBM makes money in all sorts of different ways. Services. Software. Licensing. Financing. Mainframes. They want to get deep into the small business market but the reality is they sell primarily to large corporations and governments. They own technologies that go into memory chips, lasik eye surgery, online shopping and “even data mining to optimally schedule maintenance of large infrastructure systems, such as energy grids, buildings, hospitals and transportation departments.”

IBM is a quiet giant. Which is the way they’ve always been for the past hundred years. They don’t seek the headlines. They’re not out to be sexy. And in a difficult economy, and a rapidly changing technology industry, a small business owner like me can learn a lot from them.

For starters, IBM sells almost entirely to businesses. Think about it – when was the last time you bought an IBM product? There was once a time where consumers could buy their computers and laptops, but this officially ended with the sale of their ThinkPad division to Lenovo in 2005. This is why they stay out of the limelight. Sales of gizmos and gadgets to consumers always get the most media attention. But along with that market comes exposure…both good and bad. Consumers are fickle and products succeed and fail more easily. In the changing world of consumer likes and dislikes a lot of products aren’t even given the chance to succeed. I’m relieved that my company sells directly to businesses, mostly small and medium sized companies. And, as IBM surely has found, there are lot of advantages to do doing this.

Business contracts can not only be extremely profitable, but very stable. Businesses make long term commitments in each other. Decisions are made less on emotion and more on return on investment. IBM’s customers invest millions with them to create and support infrastructures that will last for years. Once a decision like this is made, it’s hard to turn back. Everyone has the incentive to work together to figure out problems and maximize their profits. Businesses tend to pay their bills too. They have budgets. They plan. In many respects it’s just easier and more efficient to do business with businesses. That’s why IBM does this. I’m going to continue to do the same

As a technology company, IBM does not get caught up in selling lots of little devices or hardware. Of course they sell mainframe systems and related accessories. But the reason behind this is to support their software development, financing and services. It’s very, very difficult to make money selling hardware. Just ask HP. It’s too commoditized. It’s too competitive.

IBM is heavily invested in software because, according to venture capitalist Marc Andreesen, software is eating the world. “In today’s cars, software runs the engines, controls safety features, entertains passengers, guides drivers to destinations and connects each car to mobile, satellite and GPS networks. Wal-Mart uses software to power its logistics and distribution capabilities. And the success or failure of airlines today and in the future hinges on their ability to price tickets and optimize routes and yields correctly—with software. Oil and gas companies were early innovators in supercomputing and data visualization and analysis, which are crucial to today’s oil and gas exploration efforts.” These industries are using IBM’s software. This is what IBM does.

And what have we learned about software? It requires service. That’s because software needs to be installed, configured, customized, changed and then taught to users. And then it needs to be integrated with other software systems. And after all that’s done, software needs to be supported so that it can continue to run on new devices, operating systems and hardware platforms. IBM does this too.

IBM is IBM because of their investment in technology. For the 18^th year in a row, IBM ranked #1 in companies receiving U.S. patents with 5,895 granted. The company expects to spend $20 billion in acquisitions between 2011 and 2015. Just this year they’ve invested heavily in data analytics and a new hybrid cloud solution. IBM’s not alone in this – all good technology companies invest heavily in research and development.

Using IBM’s model, I’m going to focus on software and services and resist the temptation to become an IT firm who sells hardware. We’ll make our money from sales margins and, most of all, from services. Because our clients too will need their software installed, configured, customized, supported and integrated with other systems. And their people will always need to be trained in how to use their software productively.

This teaches me something. Business is tough this year and the economy is limping. But I’m sinking what few dollars I have into a new newsletter platform to get better information delivered to my clients more efficiently. And I’ve decided to spend a large amount of money (for me) to create a state-of-the art print and electronic training manual with video for some of the products we sell because there seems to be a market need for it. Like IBM I plan to reinvest a significant portion of my profits each year in new projects, new technologies, new tools that will help my clients or, at the very least, help my people help my clients.

The other thing I appreciate about IBM is their product mix. Per this 4Q 2010 analysis IBM’s services account for about 50% of their revenue, with the remainder of revenues split almost evenly between hardware and software sales. They sell to the auto, pharmaceutical, energy, transportation, and many other industries. They sell to governments all over the world. They operate in hundreds of countries. This is what good companies do. They spread the risk. They don’t put all of their eggs in one basket.

I’ve been lucky in this regard. We have hundreds of clients in many different industries. Most of them are smaller companies. If one project fails it doesn’t cripple us. If a client is angry with us, we try to learn but we’re usually not so invested that we can’t survive if they go somewhere else. In this world, you can’t please everyone. Where bugs and errors and bad code from developers proliferate, I’ve become accustomed to these headaches. My industry has plenty of success stories…and an equal number of failures. Remember OS/2 Warp? Like IBM, I need to make sure I’m not betting too heavily on any one technology to succeed.

Surprisingly, I don’t find IBM listed on any of the popular “Best Places To Work” surveys. I read that they have a loyal and happy workforce. But I also read that they offer less benefits than the competition. Being the Internet, I’m not sure what to believe. But it’s disappointing that a company as large and old and respected as IBM is not consistently on the top of all of these lists. They should be. They’re not doing enough.

Even from this I learn. My company isn’t big enough to make any ‘best places to work’ list. But if I’m going to focus on services then my company’s success will be on the shoulders of the people working for me who are providing those services. To that end I’ll overpay. I’ll provide the best benefits that I can. I’ll find the best people that I can afford and treat them well. Long hours are part of any job in this industry. But a good work-life balance is more important. IBM may be around for another hundred years. But I won’t. Life is too short to kill oneself, or your employees, over a couple of bucks.

So where the heck is Big Blue? After a hundred years, they’re still one of the main players. And I’m still learning from them.

Besides Forbes, Gene Marks writes weekly for The New York Times and frequently for The Huffington Post and American City Business Journals. He runs a ten person consulting firm outside of Philadelphia and can be followed on Twitter.

The Joan Gaeta Lung Cancer Fund October 2011 eNewsletter

2011-09-27T13:32:00.000-04:00

The October 2011 Edition of The Hummingbird Times can be found here.

Please forgive the couple of typos! ;-)

IBM Software ASL: A Discussion [#IBM #ASL #ibmpartners #isv]

2011-09-26T10:30:00.000-04:00

How ASL can help you meet your business goals...

Some examples of how the IBM ASL agreement

has helped some other ISVs.

STORServer needed custom pricing to penetrate the SMB customer market. Through the IBM ASL agreement, they were able to do just that.

In Summary

ASL provides you with the ability to:

Bundle IBM software with your solution.
Leverage your discount to price your solution to maximize profit.
Sell the total solution under ONE contract to your customers anywhere in the world.

All of this will help you to:

Get to market faster.
Sell into new markets.
Expand your ecosystem.
Maintain customer satisfaction.
Reduce your sales cycle.

#IBM THINK Exhibit in NYC

2011-09-26T00:00:00.000-04:00

An Exploration into Making the World Work Better

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVrXAsYd1Wk

The THINK exhibit, located in Lincoln Center at the corner of Broadway and W. 65th Street in New York City, will be open to the public from September 23 to October 23, 2011.

The exhibit features real-time displays of data on New York City's air, solar and traffic systems, an immersive film that highlights stories of progress, and a self-guided interactive tour that allows visitors to explore the ways science and technology have improved the world.

Free admission.

The Joan Gaeta #LungCancer Fund Has an All-New Web Site

2011-09-23T20:57:00.000-04:00

Redesigned. Easier navigation. Sleeker interface. Smartphone enabled...

...same great resource.

www.forJoan.org | www.DancingforJoan.org

www.BloggingforJoan.org | www.NobodyDeservesIt.com

#IBMSoftware and #ASL: Value for You and Your Client

2011-09-21T09:32:00.004-04:00

The entire "Value for You and Your Client" series of posts, by IBM Software brand...

#IBMRational and #ASL: Value for You and Your Client

2011-09-20T11:41:00.001-04:00
Fifth in my "Value for You and Your Client" series of posts. Here, I will focus on IBM's Rational software brand.

Rational Functional Tester and Rational Quality Manager: Integrated testing of you applications at the time of deployment to ensure timely customer application acceptance, customer satisfaction and quick time to value.

Ensure the quickest acceptance of applications and upgrades.
Maximize customer satisfaction by including functional testing as part of their application deployment.

Rational AppScan Source Edition: Ensure the security of your applications before, during, and after your customers' deployment.

Ensure applications and upgrades, when customized and deployed by your customers, are safe and secure for web operation.

Rational Team Concert, Rational ClearCase, and Rational ClearQuest, Rational Doors: Enable seamless configuration management of code changes during application customization and implementation.

You can enable your customers to ensure the integrity of any and all changes made when customizing your applications for deployment.

Rational Software Architect + Deployment Extension + Rational Automation Framework for WebSphere: Automate the deployment of complex applications (especially WebSphere-based apps) to optimize customer acceptance.

Ensure the quickest and easiest acceptance of complex applications and upgrades to maximize customer satisfaction, by automating deployment

Rational Team Concert, Rational Quality Manager, Rational Functional Tester, Rational Performance Tester, Rational AppScan: Provide Software as a Service offerings in three key target areas: Software Collaboration, Software Testing, and Web Application Security Testing

Build value-added hosted services offerings to complement your resale offerings and tap into new whitespace markets

Rational Compilers for z and Power: Increase ROA (Return on Assets) and reduce capital expenditures for z and Power clients implementing new applications.

In new and upgrade HW scenarios, customers are assured maximum processor utilization and application performance.

CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays for Sale!

2011-09-19T08:43:00.000-04:00

New discs added to inventory!

Selections from diverse artists, including...

Barenaked Ladies, Johnny Cash, Dire Straits, Fleetwood Mac, Genesis, KISS, Bob Marley, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Paul McCartney, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and The Rat Pack (Frank, Sam, and Dino).

Check them out today at http://joegaeta.blogspot.com/p/cds-dvds-blu-rays-for-sale.html

ESPN.com is able to handle 15,000 requests per second using only 200 Gigs with #IBMWebsphere eXtreme Scale

2011-09-16T13:51:00.000-04:00

#IBMLotus and #ASL: Value for You and Your Client

2011-09-15T14:33:00.006-04:00
Fourth in my "Value for You and Your Client" series of posts. Here, I will focus on IBM's Lotus software brand.

I will show how these offerings - combined with an ASL Agreement - can positively affect your bottom line by offering a superior solution to your client and providing you with reduced development costs, greater account control, and increased revenue.

LotusLive: Offers market-leading collaborative software solutions under a contract vehicle to Teclos that is more adaptable to how they sell to their end customers.

Your application can become more competitive by improving your client's total cost of ownership
83% storage cost savings / 30-35% support cost savings
50% more processing power with 1/2 the number of CPUs

Notes/Domino: Upgrade to 8.5 and experience significant and rapid infrastructure savings while innovating through advanced collaboration.

Notes/Domino 8.5 drives savings as high as:
Storage related savings 40-60%
Security/ID management savings of 25%
Admin/maintenance savings of 30%
Additional hardware consolidation savings of 30%

Portal+ Mix: Exceptional Web Experience (Project Northstar) allows you to to use a flexible, comprehensive offering, bringing together essential features and functionality tailored to help your cleints provide their customers with an exceptional and engaging online experience. IBM Customer Experience Suite enables clients to respond more rapidly and confidently to customer needs and expectations - and reach across multiple online channels - all while helping boost customer satisfaction, brand recognition and profitability.

Businesses are built on customer relationships. Increasingly, such relationships are developing and growing over the Web, requiring organizations to make use of online channels to attract, retain, and delight customers and citizens. Some of factors driving businesses to reexamine the effectiveness and compellingness of their Web channels, and therefore differentiate themselves from their competitors, include the need to:

Drive revenue & increase brand loyalty with enhanced web experiences that include native social & mobile capabilities
Improve customer satisfaction & reduce costs through online self-service that's quick and easy to use
Deliver greater flexibility & drive incremental value by creating personalized web experiences that seamlessly combine back-end applications, commerce solutions, social media sites, and cloud-based services

Connections: IBM Lotus Connections is social software designed specifically for the demanding requirements of business. It lets you utilize the collective knowledge of your organization, partners, and customers by dynamically building new connections between people, the information they know, and the tasks they are executing.

With IBM Lotus Connections, businesses of all sizes can be empowered to be more innovative and execute more quickly by using dynamic networks of coworkers, partners and customers. Leveraging these new community collaboration tools, customers now have the ability to: complete projects involving geographically dispersed workers more efficiently, build more responsive teams by enabling them to more quickly find needed experts and information.

Contact me any time to learn more.

#IBMTivoli and #ASL: Value for You and Your Client

2011-09-14T11:00:00.000-04:00
Third in my "Value for You and Your Client" series of posts. Here, I will focus on IBM's Tivoli software brand.

I will show how these offerings - combined with an ASL Agreement - can positively affect your bottom line by offering a superior solution to your client and providing you with reduced development costs, greater account control, and increased revenue.

IBM Service Delivery Manager (ISDM) and Virtual Server Protection (VSP): A cloud computing platform for ISVs and SPs with cloud solutions
ISDM provides the basic function required for any Cloud Computing environmentProvisioning of resourcesUsage and AccountingMonitoring for Availability
VSP provides the security functionality required for Virtual environments
Storage, Security, and Availability
Tivoli provides user and access security as well as compliance, data protection and high availability solutions which add value to IM, AIM and Lotus solutions.
Maximo
For solution providers managing assets across industries in a highly available environment.
Netcool, NW Config Management, Storage: Advanced Metering Infrastructure and Meter Data Management Solution Providers
For providers focused on AMI and ADM.
Tivoli provides basic to advanced Network Management and Config Management for AMI and the Storage and Availability Solutions for ADM
Tivoli Endpoint Manager (formerly Big Fix):
For Managed Service Providers that require a solution that enforces continuous compliance across endpoints, automatically assessing, reporting and remediating to bring devices into proper configuration.
Contact me any time to learn more.

09.11.01 / 09.11.11

2011-09-11T15:00:00.000-04:00

#IBM #DB2 Functionality Comparison

2011-09-08T09:48:00.000-04:00

Click chart for larger version.

5th Annual Dancing for Joan! Save the Date! Help Fight #LungCancer

2011-09-07T23:13:00.000-04:00

The Fifth Annual Dancing for Joan is set for Saturday, February 25th, 2012!

Dancing for Joan is The Joan Gaeta Lung Cancer Fund's annual fund raiser that honors Joan’s love of dancing. It is a festive evening of cocktails, dinner, great music, dancing, silent auction, and a “call to action” in the fight against lung cancer.

Dancing for Joan is a fun and exciting way to honor important contributors in the crusade and to raise the funds needed for research and awareness.

We our very proud to be celebrating our fifth anniversary of fighting lung cancer and hope you will join us.

Sponsorship packages are now available! We offer four affordable sponsorship packages to fit any budget. Click here for their descriptions and to purchase. Or, you may contact us at (404) 0987-0792 or gaetafund@gmail.com for more information.

Watch this space for more information as it becomes availalbe! Spread the word!
85% of the net proceeds from Dancing for Joan will be invested in the Addario Lung Cancer Medical Institute (ALMCI). Learn about our affliation with ALCMI here. Visit ALCMI online at http://www.alcmi.net/.

IBM Information Management and #ASL: Value for You and Your Client

2011-09-07T12:08:00.001-04:00
Second in my "Value for You and Your Client" series of posts.

Here, I will focus on IBM's Information Management software brand. I will show how these offerings - combined with an ASL Agreement - can positively affect your bottom line by offering a superior solution to your client and providing you with reduced development costs, greater account control, and increased revenue.

DB2: A lower total-cost-of-ownershipdatabase for ISVs than Oracle. Your application can become more competitive by improving yourclient’s TCO.
83% storage cost savings
30 to 35% support cost savings
50% more processing power with ½ the number of CPUs

Informix: Deploy yourapplication in multiple locations with little or no DBA support. You can more readily sell and deploy large roll outs (e.g.,Retail) since Informix was engineered to be integrated with distributed ISVapplications. Informix requires a verylow amount of DBA support.
90%+ administrative savings
50% fewer outages

Optim: Reduce timeand complexity of application upgrades. Works with Oracle, MS SQL Server, and Sybase. You can more easily sell and provide version upgrades toyour existing client base.
50% reduction in customer downtime during upgrade

solidDB: Access datain memory for dramatic performance improvement. Works with Oracle. Your application can use standard SQL to increase responsetime and throughput by accessing data in memory.
Tens of thousands of transactions per second.

Federation Server: Access and integrate diverse data sources as though they were a singlelocal source. Your application can more easilyt integrate with your client’senvironment by accessing data where it currently resides.
40 to 65% reduction in integration coding.

Change Data Capture: Synchronize data without impacting production systems. Your application can sense and respond to data changes causedby other applications or events.

Traceability Server: Track and trace product or asset information. Your application can more readily meet your client’s safety andrecall requirement s by tracing and tracing products and assets (e.g. Foodrecall).

Global Name Recognition: Improve your client’s confidence in name data. If you have a risk-compliance application, you can recognizevariances in names, across cultures.

MDM Server: Centralize disparate data sources for use by your solution. Your applications can deliver business insights when aconsistent and standardized view of client data is required.

Contact me any time to learn more.

The Last Refrigerator: A Must-Read #lungcancer

2011-08-31T17:21:00.000-04:00
by Rob Densen
Originally published August 30th, 2011 on The Huffington Post.

I came home Monday night, took one look at my wife, and knew something was desperately wrong.

"Honey, what is it?" I asked, half inquiring, half -- by way of my sheepish intonation -- signaling my acceptance of the blame for whatever was awry in her life.

"The refrigerator.... It's dead."

"Dead, as in finito? Beyond any reasonable hope of repair?"

"Dead as in last week's vegetable lasagna is lying in the sink, a disgusting, slimy mush. And your no-sugar-added fudge pops? Let's just say you don't want to know what they look like."

And then came the knockout punch. "This is your fault."

I couldn't argue. For the last week or so, as our 14-year-old refrigerator struggled for its last few cooling breaths, I was making my wife miserable in her search for a replacement, something that should, normally, be a mindless, checklist task.

Our late refrigerator was a full-length side by side, with beveled wood panels on the doors which we got to match the cabinetry when we remodeled the kitchen. When it came to a replacement, I had relented on figuring out how to match the cabinets, but I was insistent on a side by side. My wife preferred the fridge-on-top-with-French-doors-freezer-on-the-bottom arrangement that is all the rage.

For the record, my preference for a side by side wasn't just a matter of style. With a reconstructed knee, a frozen shoulder, and two bulging discs in my back wrapped around a giant lazy streak, I generally go out of my way to avoid any sort of bending motion. It's not impossible, just a little uncomfortable.

In the week we dilly-dallied, the food was melting in the fridge -- and my wife was on the way.
The next night I returned home and all was fine. "I ordered the top/down model. It will be here Thursday."

She had been to her Pilates class earlier in the day and, in the midst of a long discussion with her instructor, it all became clear. "I realized," she said, "that this will be my last refrigerator."

A Life Measured in Kilowatt Hours

I couldn't argue with her. Not with the logic and, most regrettably, not with the truthfulness of that statement. My wife has Stage IV lung cancer. Given the arc of the disease and the quality of refrigerator design and construction, it is highly probable that this will be her last refrigerator. The question is, are we also on our last washing machine, hairdryer or big screen TV?

It is unbelievably painful -- but sobering and highly instructive -- to look at lung cancer that way. Diagnosed with lung cancer and you're not talking decades, but kilowatt hours.

It is an incredibly virulent disease. Overall, lung cancer has a 15% five-year survival rate. Stage IV lung cancer, the most common staging at diagnosis, has a 4% survival rate. Look at it this way: by the time you've finished reading this post, two more Americans will be diagnosed with lung cancer. They are likely to be dead within five years.

Here's another cold, hard and, I hope, unacceptable fact: 160,000 Americans will die of lung cancer in 2011 -- three times more than the next most deadly cancer and more than prostate, breast, pancreatic, pediatric and colon cancer COMBINED.

And while breast cancer grabs the attention, the funding dollars and the 5K walk participants, the fact is that close to 70% MORE WOMEN will die of lung cancer this year than will die of breast cancer. Many of them will be women like my wife who never smoked, Indeed, cancer in women who never smoked is one of the fastest growing cancers. No one knows why. Regrettably, not many people are even asking the question.

Of Lung Cancer and Consumer Electronics

We're so good at -- and obsessed with -- technological innovation for applications both frivolous and mundane. Yet, we're so bad at deploying our ample resources -dollars and brainpower -- against a disease that devastates close to a quarter million families every year.

Go into any consumer electronics or appliances store and you will be dazzled by the technological innovation. It's all so head-spinning that I need to take a Dramamine before going to the Apple Store.

Our new fridge? It's probably good for 20 years. Plus, the ice cube dispenser knows exactly how many ice cubes I take in my Diet Coke. The picture on my HDTV is so clear that I saw shaving cream in Brian Williams' ear the other night and, even as I write this, the cell phone in my jacket pocket is secretly capturing the inner-most thoughts of the guy sitting next to me on the train. I may be exaggerating, but not by much.

Finally, consider this -- last year, Apple spent $1.8 billion on R&D (Microsoft spent more than four times that amount) Want to know what the National Cancer Institute spent researching lung cancer, the number #1 cancer killer by a factor of three -- about $282 million.

We can communicate globally without concern for time or distance, access the world's libraries from our desktops, tap orbiting satellites to map the most routine trip, and short gold with a swipe on our phone. We've made a Jackass movie in 3-D -- and there are smartphone applications that fight acne. But we can't figure out how to diagnose lung cancer early, or why non-smoking women are getting cancers in record numbers, or how to boost overall lung cancer survivability from a mere 15%?

Something is badly off in our world. Shameful, actually. There's an app for that. It's called compassion.

For more information or to support lung cancer research and advocacy, please visit one or more of the following sites: Uniting Against Lung Cancer, OneBreath, The Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation, National Lung Cancer Partnership, or the Lung Cancer Alliance

#IBMWebSphere and #ASL: Value for You and Your Client

2011-08-30T09:32:00.002-04:00

Business Process Management (BPM)
WebSphere Products

IBM BlueWorks Live

WebSphere Lombardi Edition

WebSphere iLog BRMS

WebSphere BPM

Value

Platform for Process Applications

Business Process Documentation, Collaboration, and Automation

Human-centric BPM or Business Rules Management

Universal Integration
WebSphere Products

WebSphere MQ

WebSphere MB

WebSphere MQ FTE

Cast Iron

Value

Quicker Connections with Partners and Suppliers

Industry Standard Data Formats and Communication Protocols

Tighter Integration of Applications and Data

Secure, Auditable and Automated File Transfer

Optimize WAS Environment for Higher Value
WebSphere Products

WebSphere Application Server

WebSphere eXtreme Scale

Cast Iron

Value

Fully Utilize Hardware and Software Application Infrastructure

Delay or Eliminate the Need to Upgrade Backend Systems

Improve Application Availability

Drastically Reduce Implementation Time and Cost and reduce Risks/Errors

Learn more about Application-Specific Licensing here.

Jogging for Joan - Save the Date(s)

2011-08-29T14:10:00.001-04:00

November is Lung Cancer Awareness Month! There are two Lung Cancer Awareness 5Ks coming up in Atlanta area. Mark your calendars! We are setting up team "Jogging for Joan" at each one of these events.

When our team pages are completed, we will post the URLs here. Spread the word!

No More Excuses 5K
Supporting Lung Cancer Alliance
Saturday, November 5
North Point Shopping Center
Alpharetta, GA

Breath Deep Atlanta 5K
Supporting LUNGevity Foundation
Saturday, November 12th
Georgia Tech Campus
BioTech Courtyard
315 Ferst Avenue
Atlanta, GA 30318

Stay tuned for more details...

Lung cancer matters, too.   Nobody deserves it. And, you do not have to smoke to get it.

#IBMSoftware #ASL and #OEM Distinctions

2011-08-26T10:48:00.001-04:00

Check out the latest #lungcancer headlines.

2011-08-26T09:19:00.000-04:00

www.LungCancerHeadlines.com

#IBM #Tivoli Endpoint Manager + #ASL = Increased Profitability and Improved Service Levels for Managed Service Provders

2011-08-24T16:14:00.001-04:00
Are you a managed service provider? Frustrated with how hard it is to manage multiple applications from multiple consoles across increasingly complex and globally distributed networks? IBM is proud to offer Tivoli Endpoint Manager.

IBM has been working with Managed Service Providers for the last five years. One of the chief concerns we are hearing from our customers and partners is their frustration with missing market opportunities due to undifferentiated product offerings.

For example, we have client who felt that the competition for business customers was increasing and many new offerings were on the market. They said that needed a way to target new business customers with competitive services without having to deploy more expensive infrastructure equipment. We provided them with this capability. The result was that their offerings to business customers were perceived as a higher value therefore they closed 20% more business resulting in an increase in revenue of $50,000 per month.

Here is an example of anther service provider business partner. They stared using Tivoli Endpoint Manager two years ago. They were:
Having problems managing and patching multiple operating systems and major 3rd party Apps.

Getting first pass patch rates of about 60%.

Unable to verify who they had missed.

Unable to introduce new services because the build out of the infrastructure and the time to value was too great.

The Solution:
After deploying Tivoli Endpoint Manager our partner was able to get a first pass patch rate of between a verified 95% - 99%.

Their time to patch went from an average of 2 weeks down to 6 hours across 100,000 endpoints.

They were able to add and deploy 3 new services with NO new infrastructure in 6 months that resulted in a monthly increase in revenue of $60,000

I would like to share with you how we can make this happen for you with Tivoli Endpoint Manager and an Application-Specific License agreement.

Feel free to contact me at 770-863-1493 or jagaeta@us.ibm.com and I will schedule the resources we will need to discuss your specific requirments and set up a custom demo.

Maximize The Effectiveness of Your Client Sales with Application-Specific Licensing from IBM Software

2011-08-23T13:58:00.000-04:00

Gain control and improve profits.

Deliver an integrated offering with one worldwide contract.

Delivering a total solution to clients makes good business sense and now it can also improve your bottom line. By bundling IBM software into your solution, you can provide your clients with all the software necessary to deploy, run and manage your solution.

IBM Application-Specific Licensing (ASL) provides you the vehicle to deliver your solution bundled with IBM software under one contract, to clients anywhere in the world at a fixed price and supported end-to-end by your organization.

IBM ASL makes it easier for you to do business:

Accelerate your sales cycle by bundling IBM software with your solution under one simplified contract

Be the single point-of-contact to your clients from pre-sales activity to ongoing annual software renewal

Improve your profitability by bundling IBM software at a fixed price.

Take the next step, get started now. Call met today at (770) 863-1493.

What the #IBMSoftware Story Means for Business Partners

2011-08-23T09:48:00.001-04:00

Originally published August 22nd, 2011 by Jacqi Levy on The IBM Software Business Partner Blog at http://bit.ly/qlsW8l. Follow Jacqi on Twitter @IBMPartnerMktg

It was late 2008 when IBM first started to talk about building a  Smarter Planet, and how software fits into that story. Yet, occasionally, I still hear rumblings from IBM's Software Business Partners who are unsure how a big, lofty idea such as Smarter Planet ties into what they are doing on a day-to-day basis.  Recently, a series of new resources were published on PartnerWorld to help you further the IBM Software Story with your clients, so I figured now would be as good a time as any to help break this down for you and explain how IBM's Smarter Planet vision and strategy can help you generate new business opportunities.
Quick Summary: Smarter Planet for Dummies
Basically, Smarter Planet is a response to several fundamental shifts that have been happening in the marketplace over a number of years.  You'll see IBM using three key words to describe the shift: the world is becoming more instrumented + interconnected + intelligent.  What does this mean, in a nutshell?  Smart devices are generating more data are generating more data than ever before, and companies need help making use of this data.  Web 2.0 is enabling them to interact and collaborate with their customers in real-time, increasing the speed at which business happens.  Intelligence, in the form of software, is being integrated into all aspects of business, and into the systems and processes that make the world work: cars, appliances, roadways, power grids, etc.  With this new marketplace comes a new set of business problems that our customers need solved: managing data, security risks, global integration and connectivity, and higher expectations for value.
Software is at the heart of the majority of  IBM's Smarter Planet solutions, integrated across hardware, software and service offerings.  IBM's Smarter Planet vision continues to resonate with clients of all sizes globally.  And it's not just marketing hype...it's generating real business results.  IBM's market analysis shows that Smarter Planet solutions in key industries are growing 2-3 times faster than the IT market overall.
What is the IBM Software Story?
The IBM Software Story represents a shift in the way we service our customers, based precisely on what is happening in the marketplace.  Rather than merely talking to our clients and prospects about point products, the IBM Software Story allows us to take a hard look at our clients' business challenges, identify their biggest pain points, and solve them with integrated solutions built on the capabilities of the IBM Software Story portfolio, which may involve one or more products.  IBM Software is standards based and runs on virtually all major hardware and software platforms, and can be integrated across diverse application and infrastructure software, helping you build on and protect existing investments.
Through our work in making Smarter Planet come alive for software, a set of six key business needs has emerged.  The solutions to these needs are built on a set of core IBM Software capabilities:

Need: Turn information into insights
IBM Core Software Capabilities:

Business analytics

Data management

Data warehousing

Enterprise content management

Information governance

Information integration and federation

Need: Drive business integration and optimization
IBM Core Software Capabilities:

Application infrastructure

Business process management

Commerce

Connectivity and Integration

Enterprise marketing management

Need:  Connect and collaborate

IBM Core Software Capabilities:

Social business application development

Social collaboration

Unified communications

Web experience

Need: Enable product and service innovation
IBM Core Software Capabilities:

Application lifecycle management

Complex and embedded systems

Design, development and deployment

Business planning and alignment

Enterprise modernization

Security

Need: Optimize the impact of business infrastructures and services
IBM Core Software Capabilities:

Asset management

Business service management

Cloud and virtualization management

Network and service assurance

Security

Storage management

Systems management

Need: Manage risk, security and compliance

IBM Core Software Capabilities:

Application and process

Data and information

Network, server and endpoint

People and identity

Physical infrastructure

Security governance, risk management and compliance

How will the IBM Software Story Impact You?

Fundamentally, not much will change -- you'll still sell the same products to your clients.  The IBM Software Story just represents an enhancement to the way both IBM and our Business Partners talk about them in the marketplace, by leading with a solution to a business need, rather than than a product name.  IBM internal research shows that we sell more when we lead with solutions versus products -- simple fact.  In addition, because the IBM Software Story addresses client business needs, by design it will provide you with more cross-selling opportunities because providing an optimal solution may often involve the integration of multiple products from across the portfolio.  The IBM Software Story provides a simplified and unified way to present the growing value of the IBM Software portfolio, including recent acquisitions.  Thus, the IBM Software capabilities framework provides a logical approach for evaluating opportunities to grow your skills and expand your business focus into adjacent areas of the portfolio, in order to deliver even greater value to your clients.

IBM Software Story Resources For Business Partners

For more information, access our IBM Software Story resources for Business Partners.  These resources are designed to help you personalize the IBM Software Story for your clients,  build solution skills across the portfolio, and drive sales with your clients and prospects. Check out the IBM Software Story page on PartnerWorld, where you'll find a Software Story overview, information on the market opportunity for each of the capabilities listed above, a product reference guide by capability, fully scripted customer presentations by industry and more.

#IBM #WebSphere Application Server + #ASL

2011-08-22T09:25:00.000-04:00

If you are an independent solution vendor and want to speed up the delivery of your applications and services, operate efficiently and reliably, and ensure security and control, you should consider utilizing IBM's WebSphere Application Server in your solution.

You can learn much more here and download a free trial!

You can integrate WAS into your solution via an IBM ASL contract, providing a better product to your customer and while generating greater revenue!

Social-Media-A-Go-Go

2011-08-20T23:41:00.003-04:00

IBM.com/myrep/jagaeta LinkedIn.com/in/joegaeta

Twitter.com/joegaeta Facebook.com/ibmjoegaeta (New!) YouTube.com/joegaeta

Twitter.com/forjoan Facebook.com/forjoan YouTube.com/forjoan

Quote of the Day #IBM #HP

2011-08-19T14:38:00.003-04:00

"I want to be more like IBM."

- HP CEO Leo Apotheker

See What #IBM Clients and Business Partners Are Saying

2011-08-19T09:06:00.003-04:00
You need smarter software to build a smarter planet.
Learn much more at http://www-01.ibm.com/software/info/ibmsoftware/
In this video, IBM clients discuss how IBM is rising to meet their changing software needs and the challenges they face as it relates to software requirements. Keeping up to date with an ever changing industry can be daunting. IBM software is critical to the ability to be agile in responding to business changes. The IBM Smarter Software approach enables you to deliver platforms with flexibility, embrace business agility and deliver more value, more quickly, without compromising the quality and the integrity of your deliverables.
If you are an independent solutiion vendor and want to learn how to integrate IBM middleware into your solution to help you realize larger profits, greater account control, and increased customer satisfaction, give me a call at 770-863-1493 or e-mail me at jagaeta@us.ibm.com.

Press Release: #IBM Unveils Cognitive Computing Chips

2011-08-18T12:59:00.002-04:00

[Orginally published on 8/18/11 at http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/35251.wss#feeds]

ARMONK, N.Y., - 18 Aug 2011: Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) researchers unveiled a new generation of experimental computer chips designed to emulate the brain’s abilities for perception, action and cognition. The technology could yield many orders of magnitude less power consumption and space than used in today’s computers.
In a sharp departure from traditional concepts in designing and building computers, IBM’s first neurosynaptic computing chips recreate the phenomena between spiking neurons and synapses in biological systems, such as the brain, through advanced algorithms and silicon circuitry. Its first two prototype chips have already been fabricated and are currently undergoing testing.
Called cognitive computers, systems built with these chips won’t be programmed the same way traditional computers are today. Rather, cognitive computers are expected to learn through experiences, find correlations, create hypotheses, and remember – and learn from – the outcomes, mimicking the brains structural and synaptic plasticity.
To do this, IBM is combining principles from nanoscience, neuroscience and supercomputing as part of a multi-year cognitive computing initiative. The company and its university collaborators also announced they have been awarded approximately $21 million in new funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for Phase 2 of the Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) project.
The goal of SyNAPSE  is to create a system that not only analyzes complex information from multiple sensory modalities at once, but also dynamically rewires itself as it interacts with its environment – all while rivaling the brain’s compact size and low power usage. The IBM team has already successfully completed Phases 0 and 1.
“This is a major initiative to move beyond the von Neumann paradigm that has been ruling computer architecture for more than half a century,” said Dharmendra Modha, project leader for IBM Research. “Future applications of computing will increasingly demand functionality that is not efficiently delivered by the traditional architecture. These chips are another significant step in the evolution of computers from calculators to learning systems, signaling the beginning of a new generation of computers and their applications in business, science and government.”

Neurosynaptic Chips
While they contain no biological elements, IBM’s first cognitive computing prototype chips use digital silicon circuits inspired by neurobiology to make up what is referred to as a “neurosynaptic core” with integrated memory (replicated synapses), computation (replicated neurons) and communication (replicated axons).
IBM has two working prototype designs. Both cores were fabricated in 45 nm SOI-CMOS and contain 256 neurons. One core contains 262,144 programmable synapses and the other contains 65,536 learning synapses. The IBM team has successfully demonstrated simple applications like navigation, machine vision, pattern recognition, associative memory and classification.
IBM’s overarching cognitive computing architecture is an on-chip network of light-weight cores, creating a single integrated system of hardware and software. This architecture represents a critical shift away from traditional von Neumann computing to a potentially more power-efficient architecture that has no set programming, integrates memory with processor, and mimics the brain’s event-driven, distributed and parallel processing.
IBM’s long-term goal is to build a chip system with ten billion neurons and hundred trillion synapses, while consuming merely one kilowatt of power and occupying less than two liters of volume.
Why Cognitive Computing
Future chips will be able to ingest information from complex, real-world environments through multiple sensory modes and act through multiple motor modes in a coordinated, context-dependent manner.
For example, a cognitive computing system monitoring the world's water supply could contain a network of sensors and actuators that constantly record and report metrics such as temperature, pressure, wave height, acoustics and ocean tide, and issue tsunami warnings based on its decision making. Similarly, a grocer stocking shelves could use an instrumented glove that monitors sights, smells, texture and temperature to flag bad or contaminated produce. Making sense of real-time input flowing at an ever-dizzying rate would be a Herculean task for today’s computers, but would be natural for a brain-inspired system.
“Imagine traffic lights that can integrate sights, sounds and smells and flag unsafe intersections before disaster happens or imagine cognitive co-processors that turn servers, laptops, tablets, and phones into machines that can interact better with their environments,” said Dr. Modha.
For Phase 2 of SyNAPSE, IBM has assembled a world-class multi-dimensional team of researchers and collaborators to achieve these ambitious goals. The team includes Columbia University; Cornell University; University of California, Merced; and University of Wisconsin, Madison.
IBM has a rich history in the area of artificial intelligence research going all the way back to 1956 when IBM performed the world's first large-scale (512 neuron) cortical simulation. Most recently, IBM Research scientists created Watson, an analytical computing system that specializes in understanding natural human language and provides specific answers to complex questions at rapid speeds. Watson represents a tremendous breakthrough in computers understanding natural language, “real language” that is not specially designed or encoded just for computers, but language that humans use to naturally capture and communicate knowledge.
IBM’s cognitive computing chips were built at its highly advanced chip-making facility in Fishkill, N.Y. and are currently being tested at its research labs in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. and San Jose, Calif.
For more information about IBM Research, please visit ibm.com/research.

IBM Software ASL: Your Solution. Your Customer. Your Profit. [#ibmpartners #ibmsoftware]

2011-08-18T11:32:00.001-04:00
The IBM ASL agreement is designed for Business Partners who develop and sell business solutions that contain IBM middleware software. This offering is implemented via a direct contract between IBM and the Business Partner. Under this contract, IBM will provide a master copy of each IBM middleware software offering. The Business Partner copies and bundles the IBM software (ASL) into their solution(s).

The Business Partner is required to make a revenue commitment in order to qualify for a discounted price under this initiative. The discounts for Programs and Maintenance Renewals will be based on the Business Partner’s revenue commitment and on the size of their initial purchase. (ASL contracts without a revenue commitment ("earned discount") are also available, but they provide a much lower discount .)

Benefits

The Business Partner owns the customer relationship for their solution

Prices for Programs and Maintenance Renewals are protected for the 1 year term of the contract

IBM provides telephone defect support to the Business Partner for the IBM middleware software licenses covered under Maintenance

The barrier for entry into the initiative is low

Target audience

Business Partners who sell solutions that are based on their own value add and are built around, or designed to operate on, IBM middleware software

Business Partners who are capable of identifying and pursuing new customer opportunities

Business Partners who have the in-house capability to replicate IBM licensed code and integrate it with their value add into a solution

Criteria to participate

To qualify for participation in the IBM ASL initiative, a Business Partner must:

Have a value add that is of higher value than the IBM software that they will sell as part of their solution

Agree to market the IBM middleware software only as part of their solution

Agree to be the entire interface to their customers for support of the IBM middleware software, and provide support as specified in the ASL Agreement

Contract stipulation

Business Partners must accept the terms and conditions of the IBM ASL Software Agreement (Base Agreement, Transaction Document(s), and applicable Attachment(s)), and the terms and processes contained in the IBM Standard ASL Operations Guide.

ASL and IBM PartnerWorld

Maximize your potential with IBM PartnerWorld. We have the resources you want—and the tools you need—to expand your reach, grow your revenue, and lower your costs today. The ASL relationship allows you to deliver the real-world solutions that customers demand. It’s what we do together—that sets us apart.

Highlights

Help you enhance your solutions and cut your development costs and training

Assist with identifying new opportunities and reducing time to market

Enable you to market and sell more effectively

There are over 40 IBM Innovation Centers around the world to help Business Partners grow their business locally and globally:

Offering opportunities to build skills to help our ecosystem remain relevant, competitive, and innovative with education resources

Helping Business Partners develop and build solutions on a growth platform based on industry standards with technical expertise

Helping the community understand how to increase revenue with IBM through marketing & sales support

Promoting seamless collaboration across a holistic community of business, technology, and academic innovators

As your PartnerWorld membership level progresses from "Member" to "Advanced" to "Premier," access to IBM sales, marketing, training and technical support offerings increases. ASL Revenue helps progress your membership level. It is tracked and combined with your achievement in other categories (IBM Server, Software, and Services revenue, skills, and customer satisfaction) to accrue points toward PartnerWorld level advancement.

IBM ASL Software Revenue and your PartnerWorld membership level

As an IBM ASL Business Partner, sales of all new ASL licenses and/or new ASL Maintenance revenue earns you points toward your PartnerWorld membership level.

Call me to learn more. (770) 863-1493

Request for Services: Complete Audio/Video Equipment/Services

2011-08-18T00:11:00.003-04:00
Blogging for Joan: Request for Services: Complete Audio/Video Equipm...: On Saturday, February 25th, 2012, we will proudly produce our FIFTH ANNUAL " Dancing for Joan " fund raiser for the Addario Lung Cancer Med...

#lungcancer "The Day I Found Out" by Bonnie Addario

2011-08-15T00:16:00.001-04:00
The Joan Gaeta Lung Cancer Fund is very proud to be an affiliate of The Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation and to be raising funds for their lung cancer research arm, ALCMI.

What you will see and hear in the video below is a big reason why. Here is Bonnie's story. Please take a moment an watch this video.

www.twitter.com/thedayifoundout
www.twitter.com/bonniejaddario
www.twitter.com/forjoan

#IBM Leads the Way in the Post-PC Era | A #SmarterPlanet Blog

2011-08-11T16:42:00.001-04:00
Link: IBM Leads the Way in the Post-PC Era | A Smarter Planet Blog

What #IBM & Sam Palmisano Could Teach Apple, Microsoft & Obama

2011-08-11T13:11:00.007-04:00
Here is an excellent blog post from itbusinessedge.com's Rob Enderle. Great information and high praise for IBM CEO Sam Palmisano!
- Joe

Rob Enderle
itbusinessedge.com
August 5th, 2011

I attended a truly brilliant speech last night. It is now one of those that I’ll likely take with me to the grave. It was done at the Computer History Museum as part of the rollout of its amazing Revolution exhibit. If you are into technology, this exhibit is a must-see.

The talk was given by Sam Palmisano, who is heading IBM as it passes its century anniversary. He is part of the reason IBM made it to the century mark because it very nearly didn’t. But he spoke about what it takes to make it through 100 years and I’ll remember both what he said and, more importantly, what he did, which is give IBMers hope. Hope is what is lacking at Microsoft and in much of the U.S. right now.

But there are two other lessons, one for Microsoft and one for the U.S. that could be pulled from this. Most interesting is that he had a message for Apple from what he learned from IBM’s charismatic CEO Thomas Watson Jr. that could allow that company to defy the odds and survive 100 years itself.

Let’s talk about hope, change and how Sam Palmisano and his team are creating magic at IBM. This magic is what a lot of companies and the U.S. need so desperately right now.

Making It to 100

According to Sam, only 1 percent of large corporations make it 40 years. He argued that this was largely because firms tend to think tactically. His subtle message seemed to be that most CEOs seem to focus more on their compensation than on the long-term survival of the firm, which is why that survival is put at risk. However, he acknowledged that wasn’t the case with IBM’s near failure; IBM had been designed not to make that mistake but had forgotten one of the key design elements that Thomas Watson Jr. had created. That design element, in the form of three unbreakable rules, had been lost.

Those rules are (paraphrased): Have a set of laws, don’t break them and be willing to change everything else. These laws/rules/defining concepts aren’t tied to ethical behavior, which is important, and they define the company. They lay out what the firm stands for, what it is in business for and, in effect, they are the soul of the firm. If you hold true to that, but are willing to change everything else, the firm can survive any industry change.

IBM slipped because it forgot its soul — one aspect of which was being a trusted partner to corporate buyers — and it was unwilling to change its business process from the mainframe model. Once it was back to being a trusted partner and had updated its business model, it enjoyed success again. The only exposure I see that it still has is that this is the first time in its history that it doesn't have something a user actually touches, which lowers its valuation. Even so, the company is trading higher than it has ever traded.

Microsoft forgot that it was created to empower users and forgetting that has put it at risk.

Investing in the Future

One of the most compelling things Sam Palmisano said was that there is so much focus on the present that few firms leave anything for the future. IBM spends more on R&D than any of its peers and 30 percent of that is focused on long-term projects that could define the IBM of the next century. It is constantly ensuring that there will be an IBM 100 years from now, which is how it made it through the first 100 years.

He also pointed out that the most important part of R&D is the "&" part. It does you no good to have research that is never developed. The company has to eventually drive the technology it creates to market, otherwise the benefit won’t be achieved. IBM is currently working on a project that will revolutionize batteries and create new elements, and it is close to releasing technology that can identify and target viruses in the body. Watson, the computer that won "Jeopardy!," was created to showcase advancements in natural-voice interfaces and cognitive computing. A possible use for Watson could be for patients to explain their symptoms to it to be more accurately diagnosed remotely or on premise (the machine did win after all).

This is also a lesson for the U.S. Government, which is tightly focused on quarterly results. The stimulus and budgets cuts were tactical but with no apparent lasting benefit and they don't invest in the country’s future adequately. They pretty much ensure that the U.S. will be an ex-superpower like England and France, which both made similar mistakes. Andy Grove, Intel’s founder, who was in the front row at the event, has said that you can’t save out of a problem; you must invest out of it. Both Intel and IBM increase their R&D during downturns in their fortunes and have emerged stronger afterwards.

IBM invested in its future and is more stronger than ever. The U.S. needs to learn that same lesson and I think IBM and I know Andy Grove are willing to help.

Wrapping Up: Message to Steve Jobs and Apple (and Every Other CEO)

The not-so-subtle message to Steve Jobs was this: Thomas Watson Jr. was also a charismatic CEO but, recognizing the problem, he worked tirelessly on creating a company that could survive without him. He made sure there were people like Sam Palmisano who could carry on, who could take IBM to new heights and could ensure that lasting legacy. Watson recognized that as wonderful as he was, he’d eventually be forgotten unless IBM survived. His immortality was inexorably connected to IBM’s longevity and IBM itself was his monument to the future. This is something that could last for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Apple could also be such a monument, but it won't if it fails to outlive Steve Jobs. For Steve and every other CEO and president, the message was clear: Your lasting legacy won’t be your big house, plane or cars. It will be whether you left the company better off than it was when you found it and whether you did everything to ensure its immortality.

Fame is fleeting; only a few dominant companies that were around when IBM was formed made it to their 50-year anniversary, and only six made it from 50 to 100. The firms that are around 100 years from now, and IBM plans to be one, will do so because of people like Sam Palmisano. Now that is a legacy Sam can be proud of and why I’ll always remember this talk.

One final thing. What employees at IBM, Microsoft, Apple and every citizen in every country including ours want is hope. Sam Palmisano gives his employees hope and that is a gift that is truly priceless.

Originally published on 8/5/2011 on itbusinessedge.com.

IBM WebSphere: An Icon of Progress

2011-08-09T14:16:00.000-04:00