CeBIT 2009: IBM's Smarter Planet with Green IT and Open Source

In his talk, Martin Jetter posed questions that IBM plans to address in the search for a "more intelligent world" that came down to four topics: New Intelligence, Working Smarter, Green and Beyond, and Dynamic Infrastructure. By the New Intelligence he meant how to harness the ever increasing flood of information by using business intelligence and search engines. Through Working Smarter IBM wants to improve information and data management as supported by more dynamic process management. Green and Beyond is another way of saying Green IT, a trend at the upcoming trade show that IBM wants to adopt through ecological IT usage, supported in part by comments by Jetter such as "85% of computing in decentralized IT environments remains unused." By Dynamic Infrastructure, Jetter referred to IBM's commitment to the IT centers of tomorrow, especially in terms of the limitations and opportunities of Cloud Computing.

As to a question posed by Linux Magazine Online whether Open Source might be an important consideration in a crisis year, Jetter responded, "It's a definite theme that we see quite clearly." He continued that companies tend not to want to develop new infrastructures during an economic downturn, but would rather integrate their existing ones better. And in this, for him, lies an opportunity for open software. IBM has been investing billions of dollars in Linux and Open Source since 2001, as confided to Linux Magazine Online by an IBM spokesperson at the preview event, and around 400 IBM workers have been directly involved with internal and external Linux or Open Source projects.

Martin Jetter was especially proud as part of his talk to present the new IBM security-on-a-stick, known as the Zone Trusted Information Channel (XTIC), that was put through pilot trials for online banking security the end of October. The device, which is getting its first full exposure at CeBIT 2009, will probably run Linux and is being put through some final design and distribution decisions.