IBM promotes IT infrastructure for cognitive workloads

Over the past century, IBM has reinvented itself again and again. This evolution is in stark contrast to one-trick ponies in the information technology business. Companies like LinkedIn do one thing, maybe quite well, until they reach the end of their run, in this case a purchase by Microsoft. IBM, on the other hand, has been forced to remake its business a number of times — moving from typewriters to mainframes, from mainframes to PCs, from PCs to infrastructure, and now, building on that last round, to cloud computing, analytics and infrastructure for the cognitive era.Each time, the change has been painful but effective. Thousands of people lose their jobs in the older businesses, and thousands more are hired to staff the new ones. The company is such a veteran of this type of move that it has even developed a template for self-regeneration. Few other companies have that.The philosophy behind this continuous upheaval is to migrate away from commodity businesses and toward high-value, high-margin sectors. This latest approach is all about enabling customers to get business value out of the vast streams of data being generated every day from both inside and outside their companies.IBM’s current focus is on IT infrastructure for cognitive workloads, an idea that combines two company strengths: its growing business in intelligent analytics and its mature position in the powerful computing hardware needed to run that type of intensive activity effectively. They are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. And at the moment, they are being co-developed, each with the other in mind.