Smarter Planet makes Smarter SIs too, especially if it's EAM
One of the major thrusts we have been seeing with IBM of late is the "smarter planet" campaign. Stripped off the hype (justifiable for any marketing campaign), its a terrific way to differentiate oneself from mundane IT related offerings to something truly (in the real sense of the term) transformational. Back in April, CNN Money had am exhaustive article on the same topic titled "IBM's grand plan to save the planet", with the byline "Here is CEO Sam Palmisano's formula for changing the world: Find problems, throw in billions of dollars in R&D, add consultants and an earnest ad campaign - and watch the profits roll in."
I was struck by the same overall zeal when I was at the "Pulse Comes to You" event (The Tivoli/Maximo partner/user meet), back in April in Goa. The over riding message then was "instrumented, interconnected, intelligent". There were a number of examples to drive home the point on how best to manage assets going forward based on each organization's own business model. One such I heard was that of Rolls-Royce which doesn't "sell" engines anymore, but only "rents and maintains" them, hence EAM becomes the core business and customer facing. Another one was that of the French national railway company creating a maintenance hub which can be used by all carriers in France (something we see quite a bit in the airline industry). Alternatively, for a drilling company, the top need was that of parts availability, hence EAM was being used for discovering parts & cutting down on parts costs.
One area considered fairly recession-proof is security (downturn or not, things are getting more regimented is this function). IBM is taking Maximo there - with the thrust on combining Physical Security (starting with access control) with IT Security, which of course flows in from IT Asset Management & IT Service Management, which in turn ties into the umbrella EAM theme covering any asset that you would want to monitor and control.
Since EAM is one of the areas I take care of here at Infosys, I view these messages and inputs with keen curiosity, to figure out how the team can make a difference as an SI in front our customers when we talk (EAM-)shop with them. SIs are forced to innovate all the time to come up with differentiators (the sizzle over the steak) to stand apart in the crowd. I feel that the smarter planet campaign of IBM offers opportunities for partners like Infosys apart from triggering thoughts on thinking beyond conventional IT-centric scope.
While looking at investment dollars for the next few quarters, I feel that mobile-only work management/inventory management has great potential in freeing up expensive labor bandwidth and productivity. Added to that would be the focus on intelligent devices and embedded components coming soon into the EAM space. Net-net, I am pretty excited about the instrumentation side of the house. Interconnectedness is a natural parallel step. I am not so sure when we'll have pure play intelligence to the level of predictive models forecasting potential failures based on trends. Until then, intelligence provided by apps would be largely alerts, monitors and near real-time reports/dashboard through our various implementations. That alone would be able to solve a lot of problems via offering slightly more reaction time than what's available today.
Wearing the customer hat, if we can offer a keyboard-free EAM experience via instrumentation alerting the user consistently for anything untoward proactively, we're halfway down the road to sewing up customer loyalty.
Comments
Gopi,
To add to the "Solutionizing" concept, when I was with Ingersoll-Rand we had provided "Air Solutions" to our Customers. We charge the customers on the volume of Air delivered (Some other parameters like Pressure, Purity etc...) and charge them based on consumption. All end to end stuff, that is manufacturing to maintenance was done by IR. Few Indian Process Plants had integrated the Alerts on different process parameters from Critical Single Stream Machinery (like vibration, temperature, oil pressure etc...) to the respective plant maintenance engineers mobile number. This enables the individual to get in touch with the control room / maintenance technicians / Engineers immediately to fix the issues to avoid major losses. DCS and Instrumentation controls are changing the ways in which assets are being maintained.
Posted by: Senthil | August 3, 2009 09:28 AM
Thanks Senthil for the comments. Selling "air" the way you described it sounds really interesting. Once the pricing aspects of the entire stack has been worked out, pricing based on the actual commodity or service purchased/consumed would be a logical next step. That said, getting all the pricing elements lined up to make an offering based on the actual service would require a lot of maturity and understanding of the service cost elements. A really good case reference though.
Posted by: Gopikrishnan G R | August 5, 2009 08:45 AM
Recent IBM acquisition of SPSS, one of the leaders in Predictive Analytics Technologies, is making the IBM Solution portfolio one step smarter in approaching towards the goal of Smarter Planet. SPSS's reach in these industry verticals such as telecommunications, banking, finance, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, consumer packaged goods, higher education, government, and market research is laudable.
SPSS capabilities may help organizations to analyze trends and patterns found in historical and current data to drive new forms of competitive advantage by predicting potential future outcomes and optimizing all elements of their businesses. I think, It may not be so far to hear about the ‘True Foresight of Predict and Act’ for improved business outcomes with Predictive Analytics capabilities of EAM solutions from IBM stack to negate blind spots in strategic information.
Posted by: Samuel Johnson Gamaliel | August 6, 2009 10:47 AM
I do not agree with Samuel! How can you say that business outcomes with Predictive Analytics capabilities of EAM solutions from IBM stack to negate blind spots in strategic information.May be it will be the deep strategy of IBM that will be come true in coming future.
Posted by: Carlos | October 22, 2009 11:33 AM