Pulse 2009: Experience Service Management for a smarter planet

Spotlight on IBM's service management vision

Tivoli Beat. A weekly IBM service management perspective Service management theory continues to gain momentum—and at Pulse 2009, it will be explored more compellingly and comprehensively than ever before.

That should come as no surprise to those who attended Pulse 2008, the premier service management of the year, which turned a spotlight on IBM’s vision of how service management can serve as a powerful mechanism to unify and optimize technological and business goals and strategies in the pursuit of ideal customer service.

Those attending Pulse 2009—a population 40 percent larger than 2008’s record-breaking attendance—will benefit from a diverse range of opportunities, such as interacting with industry gurus, building business relationships with professional peers, learning from emerging technical roadmaps and sneaking a peek at forthcoming solutions. And at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, from February 8-12, Pulse 2009 will expand and enhance IBM’s service management vision in a variety of new dimensions. With more than 200 targeted client presentations and an expected attendance of over 6000 service management professionals drawn from fields such as telecommunications, enterprise IT and plant/facilities management, the show will be a blockbuster of truly epic proportions.

Dynamic infrastructures: The how and why

The show will kick off on Monday, February 9, with a keynote address from Al Zollar, General Manager of IBM Tivoli, who will discuss the ways in which service management represents the logical convergence of IT and business infrastructures. By optimizing service management, organizations can connect global realities such as increasing digital interconnectedness, and the many new opportunities made possible by it, with today’s dynamic technical infrastructures, fulfilling customer expectations and ultimately creating not just a better business outcome but also better global results. There will also be a demo illustrating how dynamic infrastructures are being utilized today—and how in the future they might grow to encompass and support entirely new classes of services, generated with extraordinary speed to serve rapidly-emerging customer demands.

This presentation will be followed by another given by Liz Smith, General Manager of IBM Global Technology Services, to discuss the “how” of dynamic infrastructures—essentially, providing a look at the organizational journey along the way, including such key aspects as senior executive investment, organizational culture and transformative processes and technology. Specific examples of dynamic infrastructures will be provided by IBM clients and customers, including Jim Haney, Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Harley Davidson.

Service management can lead to a smarter planet

More specific information will be available from the compelling presentations and interactive sessions at Pulse 2009. These will be delivered via four different streams, each of which will explore service management from a different perspective and each of which is also logically linked to IBM’s bold new Smarter Planet initiative.

Announced November 6, 2008, Smarter Planet comprises IBM’s visionary outlook on the increasing interconnectedness, engaging opportunities and various potential challenges that confront today’s globally integrated enterprises.

Smarter Planet’s three themes—New Intelligence, Green and Beyond and Embracing Change—serve to address these complexities and suggest progressive responses. They also, however, comprise logical platforms for exploring service management. Any globally-integrated organization committed to improving service management would do well to consider it in light of IBM’s Smarter Planet concepts, such as optimized insight through business analysis and information-gathering, improved energy efficiency and enhanced operational agility.

And just as Pulse 2009 will help attendees come to grips with service management as a core discipline in the pursuit of business success, it will also help them to consider service management as an expression of Smarter Planet goals—through which an improved business bottom line for the organization can be achieved in tandem with improved conditions outside of it.

The Pulse 2009 agenda includes four days of best practices for smarter survival in a tough economy. Featured will be the launch and highlights of IBM's top priorities for 2009: Dynamic Infrastructures; Industry Solutions for Service Management; IBM’s vision of the new enterprise data center; IBM System z mainframes; and Information Infrastructure, Green Energy Management and Cloud Computing.

Four streams at Pulse 2009

IBM Service Management for Your Industry
When organizations optimize their service management, they should take into account the special conditions and contexts associated with their industries. Clearly, best-in-class service management within the telecommunications sector, for instance, will not necessarily be characterized or achieved in the same way as in the transportation sector.

Fortunately, IBM’s service management framework, focused on delivering the requisite visibility (seeing the business), control (controlling the business) and automation (driving efficiency in the business through intelligent automation and industrialization), is both powerful enough and flexible enough to apply in any given case.

The Service Management for Your Industry stream will be designed to show how IBM can help organizations to address such common concerns as recognizing and mitigating business risks, spurring compliance initiatives, maximizing return on investment and minimizing operational costs so that resources can instead be dedicated to strategic new, revenue-generating services. In this way, service management goals can be fulfilled in business sectors as diverse as financial services, utilities, service providers, retail, aerospace and defense, government, industrial and manufacturing and many others.

Subtracks in this stream will include enterprise asset management; security, risk and compliance management; service availability and performance management; network and service assurance; service delivery and process automation; and IBM service management best practices.

IBM Service Management for Business Leaders
This stream zeroes in on emerging categories of dynamic technological change through which organizational services can become more flexible, scalable, powerful and ultimately responsive to customer needs—increasing performance while decreasing risks in order to enhance the business bottom line.

Subtracks will include cloud computing, by which massively parallel architectures can be driven dynamically through next-generation provisioning to create services in real time; and hot topics in service management, such as green energy strategies designed to reduce operational costs, increase hardware utilization and yield a better global outcome through reduced carbon emissions.

IBM Service Management for You
Representing the convergence of customers, end users, IBM business partners, system integrators and of course IBM experts, this stream comprises the heart of the show.

For service management professionals in virtually any field, the opportunity to interact with and learn from professional peers and technical experts will represent an invaluable chance to come up to speed on emerging topics, challenges and complexities of all types. This stream will deliver extraordinary business value through exploring both a full spectrum of IBM service management solutions, and how they have been deployed in different real world situations, to deliver dramatically improved business outcomes.

IT Optimization
The last of the four Pulse streams focuses on enterprise IT and how, through careful optimization, it can serve as a fundamental engine of business growth and success. While many new challenges in areas ranging from security to asset management to server sprawl in the datacenter represent obstacles today, IBM stands ready to help with the industry’s most comprehensive solution portfolio—and the deep technical knowledge and industry experience to back it up.

Subtracks will include energy efficiency, virtualization, business resiliency and storage/information infrastructure.