“There are always opportunities wherever there are challenges. We have lots of challenges today. If you think back, about six years ago IBM galvanized the entire company around a very simple concept we call on demand. On-demand was a call from Sam Palmisano, our Chairman and CEO, for IBMers around the world to sit down with our clients to understand how we could help them build an infrastructure and capability for them to be on demand to their clients and for us to be on demand to them. Now this year we're rolling out the next generation of IBM initiatives that will really tie together the whole company to solve some very important problems that our customers have, but also some very important problems and challenges that we face as a society.” Those were the first words of Karl Freund, the Vice President of Z Platform Marketing and Strategy, at the IT Insights 2009 Conference. At Millennium Seoul Hilton Hotel on March 17, a nearly three hour long conference heated up the Amber room.

What Karl nailed down at the conference was quite simple: smarter infrastructure makes the planet smarter and saves businesses by helping them to save time, energy, and money. This is the idea of a Dynamic Infrastructure Strategy. The Korea IT Times delivers IBM's signal to enter a bright future with Dynamic Infrastructure.

“So these ideas around a smarter planet, they're all about the world becoming a much more interconnected place, about all the devices that are becoming interconnected and what you can do, the problems you can solve if you take advantage of that. Now this is an especially critical problem for these hard economic times because it's the companies that think forward to how they're going to take advantage and be positioned for the growth when it returns. The companies that are thinking ahead, not just thinking about cutting to get to their bottom- line costs for today, but reducing costs today so they can invest in the future. Those are the companies that are going to be successful in the next decade and years to come.

“This is about a much, much bigger story. The thought about a smarter planet is the thought that says we are going to take the interconnected world. Everything is becoming instrumented. There will be over a trillion devices by the end of this year that will basically be bought on the net. So what can you do with those things What can our customers do with those things Well, they can improve a lot of aspects of our lives today and they can drive a lot of new business opportunities for their companies. And the examples are so many, from smart water management to smart electrical grid management to smart healthcare to smart transportation systems, smart ERP systems… the list goes on and on and on.”

Smarter Planet Initiatives

“It's not that IBM is going to become a water management company, but we have customers who are managing water supplies and distribution of electricity and management of communication infrastructure and their challenges are how to make those smart and that's what IBM's initiative is all about. There are really four areas of these smarter planet initiatives. There's Dynamic Infrastructure, and three other areas: New Intelligence, Green and Beyond, and a Smart World, which is really about how you collaborate in this highly interconnected world in a more efficient fashion. Dynamic infrastructure is really about improving service, lowering cost and managing risk.”

Are we being Smart

“In Korea, as in many places in the world, you've had tremendous growth. That tremendous growth has required the build out of a lot of IT infrastructure. That IT infrastructure is what enabled Korea to build your competitive worldwide position today and changing it is what will allow Korea to position itself well for the future, but there are some things about the infrastructure today that will hold us back. It's difficult to change, it's expensive to manage and it's not very flexible when responding to changing needs. It's interesting that 78% of the data centers in the world were built before the Dot Com Era, so what they're running into is the inability to cool or deliver enough electricity to continue to grow the capacity of those data centers.

Remember the trillion interconnected devices. Data centers use a lot of energy. They call it their high energy density, and getting that energy into a small place can really be a challenge for the electrical companies. Using it efficiently inside the data center is a challenge for the others to face because out of the hundred units of energy piped into the data center only 3% is actually used for computing systems and more than half goes to just cooling those computing systems. Up to 85% of computing capacity is not used at all. That's hardware that was purchased that isn't used; software licenses that were purchased that aren't used. What a tremendous source of waste. We have to make our current IT infrastructure much more efficient and much more dynamic.”

Look and Imagine

“Many clients are achieving up to 50% reduction of energy consumption through the use of extreme virtualization like you would find on system Z or on a power system from IBM. One of the examples is KB Bank.

“Even an improvement of 20% would be the equivalent of removing three and a half million cars from roads around the world. It would be the same as planting 500 million trees or 16 million acres, or recycling 6.6 million tons of waste. We can save that for the planet just by reducing energy consumption by 20%.”

“Dynamic Infrastructure is all about changing the way people think about IT. Instead of thinking of IT as silos of assets - allocations, servers, storage - think about them as assets that are used to deliver a service. Delivering a personalized customer banking experience, and real-time processing for all retail banking transactions, regardless of whether customers wanted to manage their accounts via an ATM, the Internet, or their mobile phone, for improved service levels.”