IT in Canada: I’m wondering if there is anything really exciting coming down the pipe that people like me don’t know about yet?
Gallone: In terms of our innovation, and to give you a peek without blowing any non-disclosures, I’m really excited about announcements on the private side, the ‘do-it-yourself’ side that will help companies, who tend but don’t have to be large organizations, build it themselves. I’m really excited by our upcoming announcements around expert integrated systems and cloud appliances. I believe we’ve taken that one step further than the market has seen to date. Both the generic cloud appliances and the infrastructure-as-a-service based offerings that will make it very easy. When you buy these modules, you get your cloud infrastructure up very quickly, so your network, your storage, your compute are provisioned in one go. [Editor’s note: IBM’s PureSystems launched mid April.
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We’ve taken that one step further by allow customers to provision applications and application patterns very quickly. With the same level of ease that you would provision raw infrastructure, infrastructure-as-a-service, we’ve taken that up to the PaaS level and up to the software-as-a-service level. So customers will be able to have an application catalogue, an instance of SAP, and have all of the underlying databases and middleware pop up instantaneously, as well as all the underlying infrastructure underneath that.
