Endy Chiakpo is the country general manager, IBM Nigeria and West Africa.  He has a 20-year career with IBM in Nigeria and the U.S, spanning hardware and software as systems engineer, senior engineering manager and programme director. He was part of the team that crafted the IBM Linux strategy and the successfully commercialized IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. He has scores of technical publications and holds invention patents. Chiakpo spoke on a range of issues.

Extracting Value from Smarter Infrastructure
We have long known that organizations are living systems – made up of smaller components and systems.  As the world becomes smarter – and more human beings, man-made systems, and natural systems become interconnected, instrumented, and intelligent – we begin to achieve unprecedented freedom to build, assemble, reassemble, loosely couple, and link resources in the organization.  Organizations that are prospering most are those that are dynamic and resilient enough to stay ahead of the change required of them. And it is not just about pervasive connectivity.  For the first time, massively powerful computers can be applied affordably to processing, modeling, forecasting and analysing just about any workload or task.  New approaches to service delivery are taking hold, like cloud computing models – creating a new kind of user experience – particularly in the consumer Web space – in search, social networking, retail and productivity applications.  From the user perspective, cloud computing holds promise for organisations large and small to acquire services without needing to understand the underlying technology.  Utility wires, cars and packaged goods are becoming increasingly “instrumented” with sensors, transistors, or RFID tags.  We are all now “interconnected” no matter where we are, thanks to the Internet.  We are also becoming ever more “intelligent” because of advanced software that communicates with vast supercomputing data centres.
Major Shift Underway
There is rapidly accelerating change unfolding.  There are mergers of hundred year old companies, creation of new industries and the demise of others.  There is also the emergence of new economies, the opening of long isolated markets, the imposition of new government regulations and the relaxation of others and so on.  Today, the PC model of the 1980s and the highly distributed model of the 90’s must be replaced by a new, more integrated paradigm.  This new computing model or paradigm is based on openness, networks, powerful new technology and the integration of digital intelligence into the fabric of everyday work and life. Given our service delivery challenges in Nigeria across education, power, transport and e-government infrastructure, we are best placed to leapfrog old technology to latest technology that is based on common, standardized set of applications.  New technology allows for the running of business processes on consolidated platforms, unleashing potential synergies and operational efficiencies
Change Gap
Recent surveys indicate that 98% of CEOs plan business model changes and 83% expect substantial change.  But the gap between those who expect change and those who believe they can handle it has tripled in the past two years.  For instance, take the utility industry.  Who would not want to better manage demand with available capacity rather than build expensive new power plants?  Or if you actually knew what consumer demand was, automatically reroute power rather than overload the grid and end up with another power outage. So what is holding them back? To do that, they would have to take their IT assets out of their silos.  Utilities have to take their business or “operational” assets – that network of power plants and distribution systems – out of their silos. They could then integrate them into a “smarter grid” which would allow them to manage all those transformers and breakers, and even the smart metres and thermostats in our homes and harvest all that intelligence from their IT systems. In the food industry, consumer pressure and government regulations now mandate that food producers ensure the safety of the food supply across the supply chain.  So what is holding back the food industry?  The way the food companies monitor and control the temperature of their perishable goods is not working.  They do not have an infrastructure in place that connects the farm to the truck to the supermarket shelves. So whether it is food or utilities – while they are totally different industries, they all share something in common.  What is holding them back is what we call a “change gap.”  Their business or “operations” and IT assets are highly fragmented and highly distributed thereby creating an environment that has business and IT operations working in silos.  There is a large gap between our progress digitizing and instrumenting critical applications and processes and the rigidity of the underlying infrastructure. 
Smart Infrastructure for Smart World
What is needed today in this digitally-connected world is an infrastructure that supports the convergence of business and IT needs and assets, creating integrated “smart” assets that will enable organisations to reduce costs, manage risk and improve service while reducing costs. The key requirements that such an infrastructure has to address include the integration of digital and physical infrastructure, the need to manage, store, and analyse a massive amount of data and reduce huge inefficiencies of energy, data centre and server utilization.  The underlying technical capabilities that allow for the development of such a converged, dynamic and smart infrastructure include: Virtualization – breaking out of the barriers of physical devices in a data centre, servers, storage, networks, data and applications giving businesses improved Total Cost of Ownership, resiliency and flexibility; Energy Efficiency – optimizing the energy efficiency of the IT infrastructure to reduce costs, resolve space, power, and cooling constraints; Service Management – integrated visibility, control and automation across all of the business and IT infrastructure components that support differentiated service delivery and accelerated business growth; Asset Management – enhanced asset reliability, availability and uptime that underpin quality delivery of service according to the priorities of the business while also maximising return on lifetime asset investment along with inventory optimisation, labour efficiency, and mitigating the risk of equipment failures that jeopardise the environment and the health and safety of people; Security – adopt a new approach to managing risk and security across organisations, processes, and information as the IT and business infrastructure become more interconnected; Business Resiliency – build in capabilities to rapidly adapt and respond to risks, as well as opportunities, in order to maintain continuous business operations, reduce operational costs, and enable growth in an increasingly connected world; and Information Infrastructure – supported by a resilient infrastructure for securely storing and managing information and mitigating business risks.
These are unique and challenging, yet exciting times.  These times have great possibilities. Smart systems are transforming energy grids, traffic systems and supply chains. They are ensuring the security of financial transactions and the safety of our food supply. They are changing our business models and how we work together.  Rising cost pressures, higher service expectations, new risks and threats and emerging smarter and more adaptive technologies, such as cloud computing, virtualisation, and Web 2.0 are some of the driving forces that are further accelerating the need for this change.  In fact, in this globally integrated economy, a converged and dynamic infrastructure that enables a business access, and extracts value from all types of assets, whether it’s physical, digital, or virtual is becoming the basis of competitive advantage