The Race for Speed and Performance with Artificial Intelligence

The F1 of computing

Last week, an industry leader commented, "Anne, there's no differentiation if you are selling a Mercedes to my client when he can have a BMW or Toyota." That's a typical thinking of many businessmen today when a car is a means of transport and speed is not crucial to his business survival. He can afford to be a little late with traffic and have budget to spend on a business lunch that may help him close a deal. But what if it was an intelligent car that could give him insights of the prospect while driving to lunch while his competitor drove a normal car?

Of course, he was referring cars as IT infrastructure - who cares if one server or cloud platform is faster than another. But that was yesterday's thinking, when a car or an infrastructure or network took you from one point to another. Even car manufacturers are looking into self-driving intelligent cars. Today, every industry business leader want insights and intelligence to set them apart from the competitors. Whoever gets the best technology with the most ground breaking and fastest insights gets the advantage to make the winning move. It is a race of speed, power and smarts.

AI Supercomputing handles 500,000 times Milky Way stars

" Supercomputing is the Formula One of computing. It's where companies test bleeding-edge technology at an unprecedented scale," says John Kelly, SVP, Cognitive Solutions and IBM Research.

IBM's vision of open source collaboration has led to the building of The Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory with Nvidia, Mellanox and Red Hat. Summit is now the most powerful and smartest supercomputer for science. It builds model supernovas, stimulate quantum mechanics materials, pioneer new nano-material fabrications and explore cancer, genetics and the environment. 

Imagine handling more than 200 quadrillion calculations per second (1 quadrillion is 10 to the power of 15). That's equivalent to 500,000 times the number of stars in the Milky Way, or store the entire word's social media data in one place.

“By building these supercomputers, we are building the world’s leading AI machines,” says Hillery Hunter, IBM Fellow; Director, Accelerated Cognitive Infrastructure.

Why should we get excited?

Those working on supercomputers can save the earth through research. We can do our part with our own little projects too. What's beautiful about this AI technology is that we can now make a difference ourselves.

1.  Everyone has access- these supercomputers are built with Power9 processors and IBM Storage which enterprise own for running traditional workloads.

2.  Anyone can be AI-ready- the AI workloads are not highly customised one-off HPC solutions, but they can be used for the enterprises.

3.  Anyone can Uberize your industry- The architecture is built on AI-purposed systems that have massive scalability. So once, you're ready to take the market by storm, you are all set!

How to get started:

• Select an AI use case & try out the PowerAI demo
• Have a chat with an AI user or meet up, or arrange for a PowerAI Exploration Workshop

Last Friday, I saw a Quality Manager at a manufacturing plant with no IT background design a simple AI solution on how to improve quality inspection using PowerAI Vision. It was so simple!

More about Summit the world's fastest and most powerful supercomputer:

https://youtu.be/rn1t_T2QbSY

#summit # #datascience #supercomputing #HPC #cognitivecomputing #artificialintelligence #quantumcomputing #uberize #nano #genomes #research #ibmpower #powerAI #IBMstorage #bigdata #analytics #disruption #industrydisruption #systemsproud #annephey #leadership #CEO #businessstrategy #innovation #competition #management

Challenging The Uber Syndrome

Just yesterday, Grab announced its acquisition of Uber across South East Asia. Uber customers received notification that the Uber app will cease operations on 8th April in Singapore. While many bet on the winners and losers, one thing is for sure – the industry disruption continues.

Uber's Innovation To Success

Uber is synonymous with innovation and cross-industry disruption. When Uber surfaced in San Francisco in Mar 2009, it created a massive transformation in the transportation industry. 

Taxi companies no longer had monopoly of the business of transporting passengers. People could find peer to peer ride sharing, deliver and transportation via an on-line app. It offered convenience, transparent pricing and better service as the nearest drivers could be alerted saving time and passengers can track where the drivers are for visibility and safety. People found employment and free-lance opportunities to make a living that was convenient to their timing and location too.

The Uber Syndrome

Today, we use the term “The Uber Syndrome” to describe industry disruptions “where a competitor with a completely different business model enters your industry and flattens you.” This is a powerful quote from Judy Lemke, CIO of the Schneider Trucking Company. And growing meteorically from sheer entrepreneurship!

In the past, strategic change and management consultancies talked about business model optimization and creating viable independent business models. I studied my Masters of Business Administation and wrote my paper on the Viable System Model from Professor Stafford Beer who revolutionalized the Chile economy. 

That was great and is still used today in corporate restructuring and optimizing organizational efficiency. On top of that, executives now need to worry about competitors with new business models, who arise from outside the recognized landscape of traditional competition.

New Competitors That Aren't Classified As Competitors

IBM Institute of Business Value conducted the world’s largest Global C-Suite Study among CEO, CFOs and CMOs, the words "Uber-ized", "Uber-ization", "Uber Syndrome" and "digital invaders" were among the top concerns. The most striking quote from all the quotes collected from the executives - that is typical of what keeps executive awake at night is “The biggest threat is new competitors that aren’t classified as competitors”.

An executive from the study told us that he spends much of his time surveying the landscape of everything that is happening, constantly trying to apply his judgment to decide whether something is just a passing fad or hype that can be safely ignored, if it is a serious trend that needs to be addressed in a timely way, or if it is a tsunami that threatens to rise up and wipe you entirely off the map. Those are the worries that are causing top corporate executives to lose sleep these days.

Then there is the issue of competition across industries – or to put it another way, the blurring of lines between industries, and the threat of new, non-traditional forms of competition.

Whoever Dominates Data Science Wins

In fact, a full 54% of retail executives we talked to said that they expect competition from outside the industry to be more significant and impactful than competition from within the industry over the next several years.

More so than ever, data science plays a critical role to how executives can stay ahead of the competition. Our team at Systems on Cloud at Asia Pacific work daily with executives on cognitive computing, analytics, big data and artificial intelligence to power their journey ahead. For those new to Artificial Intelligence, we offer a discovery workshop where they can understand what it takes from data, resources and skills to embark on this journey.

Whoever dominates the data science wins. 

#uber #uberized #ubersyndrome #grab #datascience #cognitivecomputing #artificialintelligence #ibmpower #powerAI #bigdata #analytics #disruption #industrydisruption #systemsproud #annephey #leadership #CEO #businessstrategy #innovation #competition #management

Credits: Blog photo from Grab advertisement.

Marketing Creates And Captures Markets

We recently won a Global Innovation Award for our Asia Pacific efforts to grow and capture the market.  It was a recognition of marketing in our true profession of strategy, management, multi-channel and integrated marketing across content, social, digital.

Code named CAMP (Create A Market For Power), marketing lead the initiative with understanding the market dynamics, being creative to develop a programmatic approach, daring to do things differently and making an impact to the business.

It helped us achieve several consecutive quarters of year on year growth. Here is the story of how marketing led the way to this transformation.

IBM Power Systems in Asia Pacific is the market leader in the Systems of Records for IT infrastructure requirements.  With the shift in infrastructure consumption to solutions for big data, , we needed to take a hard look at our business to assess what we needed to do differently to win. We started by understanding more about the market place.

Understand The Market. Use Analytics.
The market had developed besides Systems of Records to Systems of Engagement, Insights, etc.  This new area was a fair fight with many market players who were trying to make the shift.  We assessed our position of power, who we needed to work with to extend into the new solution areas and what was needed for the shift.  This was done by using analytics, social and other listening.

Appoint Champions. Lead The Business Plan
Within the business, we needed champions who could prioritize and focus on the growth areas. The champions were needed to pitch the propositions, drive capabilities and align resources. We then mapped out the business and marketing priorities and what the game plan was. Resources included budgets, facilities and people across sales, technical, marketing from both internal and external. 

Develop The New Approach. Make It Simple.
We clearly defined the business problem as “How do we generate revenue for Brand with Who for What Solutions in Where".  The plan included considerations for conditioning the market, recruiting key players, training to develop skills, developing joint go to market, creating the market demand and generated business opportunities.  The approach had to be systematic and scalable, easy to understand and execute, convincing for investors and worthwhile for the time and effort spent.

Choose The Battle Field. Define Success
We chose to test the approach in a region where the opportunity was the largest but adoption was the lowest and in another region where adoption could match up to the pace of the opportunity growth. The approach yielded great results against the targets. In the first market, we grew our revenue by over 400% year on year.  In the second market, we achieved grew almost 200% of our target.

Determine Success Factors. Learn As You Go.
Through this initiative, we learnt that there are critical success factors that made a significant difference.

1. Quality over quantity: creating an impact helps to then ramp up the volume
2. Standardize and simplify: making things easy to speed up go to market.
3. Leveraging others' ability: Each party is better positioned as advocates and have greater influence to their segments, and it would greatly accelerate the results where we can overcome resource or capability limitations and creates self-sufficiency
4. Ownership & team work: Strong collaboration across each activity phase across the various stakeholders is crucial.  Often, one of the team members will just step up to lead beyond their role to ensure success.
5. Integrated marketing: A 360-degree engagement is required - internal and external communications, digital and off-line, business and technical, social and content, etc.

Marketing truly creates and captures the market.  While this winning initiative is being replicated across the business. The principles of how marketing can lead in business transformation can be applied to what we can create to make a difference.

This is the awesomeness of marketing!

B2B Content Strategies: Content is the heart.

It was a great gathering with a couple of panel speakers in "B2B Content Strategies: Lessons From The Trenches" with the world of content creators, aggregators, clients, agencies and communications professionals. 

Catch the interview: http://youtu.be/S0RJN6AIUUM via @YouTube

 
Here are some of my thoughts:

1. Understand B2B Content World. In the B2B world, targeting different job titles, industries, roles in decision making process, technical jargon and technology life cycle make content seem more complex than B2C.  However, if you think about it, the same targeting, segmentation and consumption patterns is studied and applied. Your target audience is human too.

2. Segment with precision. I am known as a guru of segmentation using analytics to better understand my customers and potential customers.  The reason why the marketing programs that are run by my teams are so much more effective is the precision of message and approach based on segmentation. 

3. Content can drive ROI. We have done such a great job in delivering pipeline for the business that sales believe in the power of marketing in lead generation. Demonstrating return on investment still remains an important part in getting budget and resources to focus on content.

4. Content is the heart of persuasion.  Today, there is a lot more content in multiple forms but are they the right ones? Content is the heart which transmit the right messages at the right time to the right person. Content is about how we can engage someone to develop a deeper relationship with the customer.

In the B2B world, we need professionals who are willing to invest time to understand the portfolio and pitch the appropriate content mapped to the customers' journey.

Here are some of my quotes:


“To break through the content clutter is to really understand customer and then bring the right content" 


"What do love and dating have to do with B2B content marketing?"
 
“Ultimately, when it comes to convincing internal stakeholders of the investment, IBM Asia-Pacific’s Director of Marketing for IBM Power Systems, Anne Phey, suggests “showing that conversion rates and revenue” are increasing over time. 

It may even be a case of sitting down with the business leaders and CFO to explain what marketing does, how conversations on social media help us gain insights on customers and content trends, how online activities such as web traffic, downloads, etc are monitored against targets, as well as showing the opportunity pipeline for conversion to wins. 

Adds Phey: “Our  business leader understands that content doesn’t have to generate revenue straight away. It’s like having a relationship. You’ve got to start dating and wooing the prospect before he becomes a customer. As of 2015, we’ve appointed content marketing managers. That’s a breakthrough for us.” 

Read more from Gracia Chiang's at

http://www.kingcontent.com.au/creating-emotion-in-b2b-content-marketing/