Technology has never been more important, Doug Balog, general manager, System z, IBM, told the audience in his keynote at SUSECon, the first annual global conference for SUSE customers, partners, in Orlando, Florida. In fact, according to IBM’s most recent global CEO study, for the first time, CEOs identified technology as the most important external force impacting their organizations.
Standing out amid all the other challenges organizations face are three macro-level themes - the massive amounts of data flowing into organizations, the increasing mobility of the workforce and the accompanying security risks that can bring, as well as the need to get more from their infrastructure in order to drive greater efficiency, be more flexible and more reactive.
Similar to the CEO study, Balog said IBM also conducts a CIO study every two years and finds that increasingly, to address business challenges, CIOs are placing their faith in innovative technologies in the areas of analytics, mobility, virtualization, cloud, and security across the board.
Balog highlighted IBM’s long history with SUSE and the Linux community and noted that, since its inception in 1999, Linux on the mainframe has become extremely successful. In fact, now one-third of System z clients have IFLs installed. Pointing to statistics on the growth of Linux on the mainframe, Balog noted the numbers grow quarter after quarter “because it provides value to clients at the right economic model.”
IBM has placed a high value on Linux, its relationship with SUSE and openness overall, ever since the late 1990s when the company first started to support Linux as an operating system. “Our software is optimized for it, we build systems from it, and have got a rich set of services,” he emphasized.
Looking ahead at key IT trends and the role open technologies will play, Balog cited KVM for its importance to virtualization because the market is demanding choice. He noted that data is only growing bigger and open technologies will play a major role in analytics, helping companies gain insights. And finally he said, organizations are increasingly leveraging the cloud and OpenStack is going to enable the standardization that is necessary.
Access a video of the keynote here.