Domino Unplugged

RSDC - Mills and Booch team up for Tuesday’s keynote

First off, if you're looking for the Web 2.0 links from my presentation yesterday, check THIS POST.

TUESDAY MORNING KEYNOTE

Today's keynote at the Rational Software Developers Conference was kind of unusual - Steve Mills, IBM Senior VP and Group Executive Software Group (SWG) - meaning he's the head of IBM's software unit, was there talking from a customer perspective about using Rational Software to build all the products the software group is responsible.

A couple of incredibly interesting facts Steve threw out ...

First, IBM SWG employs 33,000 developers; "far more than 'the world's largest 'software-only' company." He also pointed out that legacy software never dies. "We have more people working on IMS today - which is 40 years old this year - than we've had at any time in its history."

Secondly, no small contributing factor in SWG's growth is acquisitions - IBM has had 54 acquisitions in the software arena since 2001.

Thirdly, there's a huge push toward componentization and re-use inside SWG. WebSphere Application Server, for example, is bundled with or re-used in 126 different IBM packages. But WAS doesn't come close to being the re-use poster child: DB2 has been reused 175 times, and Cloudscape 253 times.

Steve's talk was great - first time I've seen him speak and enjoyed it immensely.

Then, rock star time.

Grady Booch.

Grady is, to the Rationalistas, what Ray Ozzie is to the Lotus Notes world.

A rock star, basically.



Booch also looked the part, with a Hawaiian short and long, flowing hair.

But, he gave a great presentation on 'The Future of Software' to the assembled throng and, while I can't possibly do justice to the whole thing a couple points stand out.

First, he said that as an IBM Fellow, he'd been told he had two jobs: 'invent the future' and 'destroy bureaucracy.'  He says: "IBM is such a rich target for both."

But, on to the meat ...

He said the real challenges surround three things:

• Storage
• Multicore
• Connectivity

Storage is going to become a huge issue - Google currently processes 20 petabytes of data a day (the internet overall handles 627 petabytes). HUGE amounts of data.

For processing power, he says that we will no longer see the 'processor wars' as we've seen them before. Power consumption and multicore are going to become more compelling sales bullets than sheer frequency.

And, connectivity is going to be critical. China currently uses far more IP addresses than the US. (Like 25% more!)

Interesting ...

Both Stave and Grady were wonderful, and incredibly warmly received by the RSDC audience.

Now, on to the sessions ...

- Rob

Leave a Comment

  Subject

  Name (required)

  Email (required)

  Website

Comment:  (No HTML - Links will be converted if prefixed http://)

Remember Me?