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Driving a Powerful Future

Power Systems roadmap offers clear, consistent execution

Companies draft technology roadmaps to tell their customers what problems a new product will solve, how development is proceeding and when they can expect that product to be released. The roadmap should be stable enough to synchronize short- and long-term development goals, as well as respond to sudden marketplace shifts. “You can’t sell a computer in this industry without a roadmap,” says Brad McCredie, IBM vice president in charge of POWER* chip development for IBM systems. “The trick is to have the credibility and ability to execute behind it.” CIOs know that when companies refuse to release roadmaps or deviate too far from them, they take a bigger risk in investing in those products. They may incur expensive downtime while they wait for an upgrade, for example, or suddenly be confronted with development, support and pricing decisions from their supplier that hinder their own strategic plans.

Recent upheavals in the enterprise server market have left CIOs uncertain about their future migration paths—from pricing to support to the continued availability of mission-critical hardware and software. Yet pressures are greater than ever for CIOs to guarantee performance and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) to deliver on their business plans. To address this uncertainty, according to news reports and industry analysis, CIOs are turning to IBM, whose proven Power Systems* roadmap will deliver performance and on-time reliability. In the second quarter, for example, IBM took 285 competitive UNIX* replacements—about two-thirds of which migrated from Oracle Sun servers.

“The stability of roadmaps and the certainty of supply is very important in the data-processing business,” McCredie says. “We were already doing a healthy migration business, but after the Oracle-Sun merger, and again at the release of the POWER7* chip, migrations from Sun to Power systems doubled.” As CIOs survey the landscape, McCredie says, they see that IBM not only offers the performance and flexibility they need, but also a proven track record of execution. “Looking to the future, our Power roadmap will be like the one in the past,” McCredie says. “We’ll hit our execution mark every time, on time, as promised” (see Figure 1).

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