Being Authentic. I Am Who I Am

A well meaning head hunter called me “Hey, did you leave IBM? Why didn’t you tell me so I can place you?” “No, I have not left. I will definitely tell you if I am looking out. Do you know something I don’t?” I laughingly replied. He replied, “Your LinkedIn job title changed to “Mindful Ledaership” so I thought you quit.”  That was just one reaction, among many connections that reacted to my profile change in surprise, happiness, curiosity, cautiousness and even disapproval.

What garnered these responses was just a change in my profile to “Mindful Leadership”. I had decided to integrate my career self and my spiritual self into one.  I had previously kept two separate identities – one professional identity as “Anne Phey – Innovator” as a kick-ass Marketing Director at IBM and another identity “Anne Phey – Mindful Meditator” that I shared about my journey of self discovery in holistic practices.

Here are the Top 5 reactions and my response:

1.  “Won’t your boss think you are spending time to blog about non-work stuff and affect your career?”

I am grateful that IBM practices work life integration and I have understanding bosses.  We recognize that team members need a healthy balance of work and private time.  While many employees may spend their week nights or weekends with their parents or children, I choose to spend my time on holistic practices and sharing them on social media.  The employee is evaluated on the results, and not how they spend their time.  So, sharing about mindfulness does not make me any less effective as an employee.

2. “You are a social advocate, why a title on mindfulness and not IBM?”

As LinkedIn’s top Social Seller, I am an advocate of social media as a medium for corporates to reach out to partners and customers.  Being an advocate does not mean talking only about one’s company all the time. Often social media becomes a bombardment of corporate jargon. People trust people.  We earn that trust by being genuine and having an opinion. I am an IBM ambassador, not one that blindly drum-beats corporate messages, but a human that one can relate to and have a conversation with.  I can share both about mindfulness and corporate content.

3. “Don’t you think it is unprofessional to share about mindfulness on corporate platforms?”

Mindfulness is an attitude, an approach and a holistic practice.  It is not contrary to corporate work. In fact, it adds to a better person, environment and work outcomes.  In the tech industry, disruptions are changing the way industries and customers are behaving.  If one practices mindfulness, one can navigate these disruptions with ease.

Personally, I have gained from mindfulness with calmness in my approach, better clarity by being able to observe alternative perspectives on situations, confidence in handling obstacles, positive encouragement to team members, motivation to do good and tenacity to outlast the issues.

Our Human Resource Director Craig Stewart too writes about mindfulness in his blogs. (See more at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mindfulness-isnt-just-fancy-way-saying-yoga-stuff-craig-stewart)

4. “Recruiters can’t categorize you if you put mindfulness into your job title.”

Human Resource as a function no longer relies on job titles and abilities on CVs but about how a person’s intrinsic qualities such as mindfulness and leadership can take the role and job scope to success.

Here is an example of incorporating mindfulness into your profile. Techfucius is a CIO (Chief Information Officer) who is a seeker of salvation from IT woes.  Instead of seeking salvation atop a mountain somewhere, he has to practice mindfulness with deep reflection within to manage a tech world riddled with disruption and uncertainty. His blogs talk about the power of strengthening what lies within (See more at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/power-strengthening-what-lies-within-techfucius-say)

5. “Have you quit your job to go full time into holistic work?”

Changing my job title to “Mindful Leader” gave many the impression that I am no longer working in the corporate world.  Most people believe that you have to either be a corporate warrior or a peaceful holistic practitioner.  I choose to be both.  I love my job at IBM and I love what I do to help individuals transform their lives. And I love showing by example to transform my life to a better person, boss and team mate at my workplace. 

Corporate and Mindfulness Merge As One

We sometimes draw such well defined lines around areas of our lives – our work, our home, our children, our recreation club and our spiritual practices.  As I discover more about myself, I become more of who I truly am at home and at work. There is just one me, I am who I am.

In fact, several social advocates have contacted me to ask how I managed to integrate mindfulness, corporate and social media.  Many have asked for further discussions and tips as they see social media and social selling cross the chasm of regurgitating corporate jargon to sharing from the heart of what matters to the person be it personal, professional or corporate development. 

So here I am, on this path of integration. I will be blogging about mindfulness on how it has helped become better persons in the corporate world, and also about the tech industry with mindfulness.   

Join me, be bold and shine as who you are. Be authentic.

6 Tips To POWER Up Enterprise Mobility!

It’s not hard to imagine that every person shares 14 instagram photos every day for a year.  That’s equivalent to 190 Exabytes of mobile data traffic projected for 2018 according to Cisco Mobile Traffic Forecast. Mobile data traffic grew 81 percent last year, 18 times more than all traffic across the global internet in 2000.

The growth comes from videos, smart phones, iOS  devices, 4G connections and M2M (machine to machine connections) goes mainstream.  By end of 2018, there will be more on mobile-connected devices on earth than people – 10 billion devices vs 7.6 billion people!

Lead with mobile

While 67% of CIOs and IT professionals believe mobility will impact their business, 85% of enterprises have no plans to employ a single mobile leader and they are not working too closely with the IT infrastructure team.

CIO Insights says mobile app testing will take up a quarter of IT budget. IBM Worklight Study predicts 75% of Fortune 500 companies will deploy HTML5 mobile apps.  Appcelerator Mobile Study finds that the first apps developed likely to be made up of 38% on B2C, 47% B2B and 63% B2E.

It’s crucial for an organization to consider these areas:

1. Develop Right From The Start

Users are going to want a more valuable experience – consistent user experience, personalized services, more functionality, better reliability and faster response time. 

It’s less complicated and requires less testing for developers to write applications for reliable hardware solutions than is to make software more resilient to compensate for the hardware’s shortcomings. Running with IBM Power lets developers focus on the user experience rather than on infrastructure workarounds.

Power is preloaded with a wide range of tools and applications to simply mobile development, such as WebSphere, which with Power’s SMT8 (the multi-threading technology) makes application development run faster and more efficiently. It saves future worries when you develop the mobile applications RIGHT from the start.

Worklight Foundation software, also part of the power Systems solution portfolio, helps users build, test, run and manage mobile applications. It has an automated versioning that saves time and expense to code and run on any device type, without having to be rewritten, enabling faster time to market and a broader market from these applications.

  

2. Access & Keep Data Secure

To deliver personalization for customers, mobile apps need to link to traditional systems, such as customer, inventory and supply databases.

Tech news reports are full of concern over data management: where data is stored, by whom and for what purpose. Most users are not familiar with data management process or user agreements.

The mobile space in the role of systems of engagement (SOE) needs to link to the traditional systems of record (SOR) where there are structured tools that support a wide array of data processing and data storage.

SORs are critical for delivering mobile experiences.  A physical in-house server allows for both the security and reliability of enterprise data. It helps create a very controlled environment for the data to live.  An internal system is practical for customers with concerns about intellectual property or confidential data.

IBM Power Systems is a mobile infrastructure solution offering security, high performance, reliability and versatility to mobile platform.

3. Process Information Fast

Mobile users expect dynamic content, but they also expect a consistent user experience – in terms of speed, functionality and reliability.  IBM Senior Solution Architect Bruce Semple says, “When you reach for your mobile device, you want to start that app up – you assume it’s going to be there. If it doesn’t work, you might unload it and get a different one.”

The challenge is maintaining the value of the experience while executing complex data-sourcing processes and computations that deliver relevant information to the end user.

This is why infrastructure is so important.  IT departments often go for x86 servers thinking they are cheaper, but they have not considered the cost of losing potential customers or worse, losing customers from not being able to deliver the customized experience expected.

Imagine, on any two-lane road, each lane can support only one stream of traffic in each direction; an eight-lane highway can move more traffic simultaneously, reducing congestion and decreasing the time and energy it takes each vehicle to reach its destination.

This analogy demonstrates how a Power8 system handles data as compared with an x86 server. Having eight processor threads per core (as compared with two threads per core on x86), Power8 is geared to handle the advanced queries faster, keeping response time short so users experience no latency.

4. Built for Big Data

Power8 not only opens the “road”, it creates “paring lots’ for data, with greater memory capacity. Power8 , built for big data, is perfectly suited for the mobile environment. There’s a much larger memory bandwidth and capacity, that means more memory can be placed under a single CPU, providing a better user experience using fewer systems.  Power8’s ability to process and holder larger chunks of information permits the delivery of richer content while maintaining the platform’s immediacy.

Power Systems are about twice as fast on average as leading competitors. If you combine Power hardware with optimized software, IBM Power is 82 times faster on big data. The real benefit comes in when we consider next generation applications with advanced mobile interaction and richer file sizes.

5. Prepare To Scale

Companies who deploy mobile strategies must remember to foresee the growth rate at the time of its inception.  Some companies attempt to launch lightweight apps that an introduction into the marketplace may explode into a large end user base. 

Some think that pubic cloud can help buffer the increase. But if it is not planned as part of the private and hybrid cloud strategy, it will not cater to the viral adoption that may trigger dramatic increase in user volume.

Unexpected events can trigger flash adoption of a mobile platform. In some instances, the change is limited to such a short period of time that extending the server sprawl to compensate would be wasteful once traffic returns to normal levels.

For retailer Bin-Ton, this was the case during the 2013 holiday season. As is true of many retailers, ecommerce business sees its highest traffic during the holiday season. Unlike brick and mortar equivalents, if an online or mobile site crashes, there is no backup system. The previous year Bon-Ton had seen its x86 servers reach a peak utilization of a dangerous 95%-96%. IBM was able to transition them over to PowerLinux servers that were fine-tuned to provide a per-core throughput 2.5 times greater than they were seeing previously.  This translated to using only 50% of the server’s computing power under the same level of stress.

Power Systems are resilient enough to allocate more computing power in these instances, scaling with demand to constantly deliver a consistent user experience, no matter how many people are connecting.

6. Open Development & Mutual Innovation

To accommodate the immediacy of today’s mobile market and help people customize their systems, Power’s Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) capabilities open the door for vendors and members of the OpenPower Foundation to add hardware and software accelerators tightly coupled to the Power system.

Power’s OpenPower Foundation lets technology companies collaborate for mobile, so any company can help enhance the capabilities of the Power infrastructure.  This offers a stream of innovation that is available to Power Systems clients.

The mutually beneficial consortium establishes an ecosystem of innovation around mobile development, says Bruce Anthony, CTO of Mobile & Wireless Systems, IBM STG. It offers a greater degree of openness and innovation in terms of how technology is made available to infrastructure companies. And as they understand the unique needs of their customers and the infrastructure that they’re supplying, they can apply that knowledge about their customers directly into the technology and either add new instructions or take advantage of the CAPI interface to create accelerators.

Enable The Future

With the evolving mobile landscape, there will be challenges for developers and enterprises alike.  Our advice is – don’t think about today’s mobile apps, think about what you could do with mobile in the future.  We should enable the future.

Move to Value: IBM Invests In Systems

As IBM consolidates the Microelectronics manufacturing with GlobalFoundries, questions were raised as to whether this would be further divestment of the systems business and why IBM would pay GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion in cash over the next three years to take the chip operations off its hands.

In a 10-year partnership, GlobalFoundries will supply IBM with Power processors in exchange for access to IBM's intellectual property. That would allow GlobalFoundries to access key chip making technology and guarantee the chips  IBM needs for its systems, like mainframe, power servers and its Watson data-analytics technology.  

IBM Divests Microelectronics To Invest In Systems

IBM needs “to narrow their focus, get their A-game on, and any distractions from a core business perspective, such as this deal, need to be put in the rear-view mirror," FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives told Reuters.  "From an IBM and investor perspective, it takes one troubled area out of the core franchise."

The cost of making chips has risen, and semiconductor development is getting more complex, making the business less viable.  Besides using its own Power chips, IBM also sold them to game console manufacturers like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft.  However, IBM still lacks scale and despite generating $1.4 billion revenue, has $700 million loss in the last year.  

According to Ana Hunter, Vice President of Foundry Services at Samsung, putting together a factory to make the next generation of semiconductors will cost about $10 billion. Globalfoundries will book around $10bn over the next year in capital expenditures – which shows you just how expensive it is to compete in the chip building side of the industry.  It makes sense to consolidate the manufacturing with foundry to pool investments and risk.

IBM East Fishkill Factory to be transferred to GlobalFoundires

(Image Courtesy of Dutchess County Economic Development Corporation)

Matt Eastwood, an analyst at IDC, said the deal makes sense because of the changing economics of the semiconductor manufacturing business. "The cost of semiconductor manufacturing is going to continue to increase, making it a business where scale will matter more and more going forward…(GlobalFoundries) also hopes that IBM's focus on growing the OpenPower ecosystem will create new demand for semiconductor manufacturing services.”

By divesting the semiconductor manufacturing business to GlobalFoundries who can scale up and build Power cores for a wider customer base, IBM will also free up capital to be reallocated to other areas.  IBM will focus on the research and design of high-end chips, servers and super-computers.  This is part of their focus on enterprise-class systems innovation.

Arvind Krishna, General Manager of IBM's Manufacturing & Development said "Over time, you will get the at-scale manufacturing that actually assures the longer-term sustainability of these systems," he said. 

“This is another milestone in our journey to transform the IBM Systems and Technology Group,” said IBM Senior Vice President, Tom Rosamilia. “The agreement focuses on the strengths of each company. GlobalFoundries will drive continued leadership in scale manufacturing becoming our premier supplier of semiconductor technology, and IBM will continue to create breakthrough R&D innovations that will fuel the next era of computing systems."

 IBM Watson, a cognitive computing built on IBM Power System

IBM’s Commitment to Systems

The systems strategy is clear: “We will continue to be a leader in high-performance systems, storage and cognitive computing, while continuing to invest in advanced semiconductor R&D.”  IBM’s research mission is unchanged -- to deliver technology leadership that differentiates their systems today while continuing the leading edge work to create the advanced semiconductor technologies of the future.” said IBM Senior Vice President, Tom Rosamilia.

Over the past year, IBM has made bold decisions, steering its portfolio toward world class systems and technology innovation. The company has

• deployed new cloud and mobile solutions for the mainframe; 
•  opened the Power architecture to more than 60 members through the OpenPOWER Foundation to expand the use of the architecture;
• invested in software defined storage capabilities and high performance Flash;
• announced investments in the next generation of chip technology, 
• developed cognitive computing systems which can help process natural language and unstructured data created by sensors and mobile devices, and
• speed up development of Watsons which is already making impact in areas like personal medicine

All of these actions reflect IBM's deep commitment to lead in enterprise-class systems.

"Given that all the design, all the software, all the operating systems, all of the firmware and all of the other system advantages that we put in remain with IBM, my basic answer would be it does not impact our mainframe, or power system or our storage clients at all," he said. 

IBM OpenPower Foundation Members at all layers of the stack

The OpenPOWER Foundation members are developing their own Power chip for server applications. Founding members include Google, Samsung, Tyan, nVidia, Mellanox.   

Google has also shown an interest in Power architecture, said Richard Dougherty, founder of analyst firm Envisioneering Group. While its large-scale data centers run mostly off x86-based systems, Google has also designed a Power server board.

Google mother board with IBM Power chip

 

The highly regarded IBM Research labs, which boasts Nobel Prize winners on staff, will also continue to rethink and reshape computer design. IBM in July announced it would pour $3 billion over five years into hardware research that could lead to quantum computers and cognitive systems that mimic brain functionality. A brain-like chip was announced in August, and the researchers have made progress in investigating chip materials beyond silicon. For example, this is a 16-chip version of IBM’s neurosynaptic (brain-like) computer.

16-chip version of IBM's neurosynaptic (brain-like) computer