You know a smart business when you see one. It's the retailer you turn to first because the merchandise is always original and available. The medical centre that coordinates your health records across 22 facilities. The power company that lets you set your own usage by appliance.
Our planet is getting smarter
These advances are possible because digital intelligence can be infused into almost any object, process or natural system that makes up the way our world works. IBM is working with visionary organisations to use this intelligence to do almost everything—from traffic flows to electric power to food supply chains—more effectively.
While select systems are becoming smarter, the vast majority of the world's IT infrastructure—mobile devices, PCs, servers, data centres, software and the processes that make it all work—remain slow, inefficient and incapable of the work ahead. But there are new computing capabilities that can literally "reinvent" existing IT properties, making them leaner, flexible, resilient and smarter.
SOA
Often, the first step to an agile organisation starts with connecting your applications in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Yansha (US), a Chinese retailer, implemented the first SOA-based supply chain, reducing order lead time from 2.5 days to 4.5 hours.
Virtualisation
Virtualisation can dramatically improve server utilisation. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre (US) is transforming its systems through consolidation, standardisation and virtualisation. This has resulted in a 150% increase in processing capacity.
Service Management
Control all of your IT assets from one point, gain greater visibility into your system as a whole and grant your users control. It's possible... with service management.
Security (US)
A smart infrastructure assumes security capabilities that are integrated across the organisation, yet specialised enough to address myriad threats.
Dynamic Infrastructure
Our strategy for a dynamic infrastructure may include asset and service management, virtualisation, energy efficiency, resiliency, security and flexible sourcing options.
Green technologies
With energy costs eating up 30-40% of the IT operations budget, green technologies are critical to any smart infrastructure strategy.
