Transforming the information technology infrastructure of IBM

The structure, strategy, and business operation of IBM have experienced a significant transformation over the last several years. This transformation has been accompanied by an equally important transformation of the internal services and technologies that support the company. Key among such activities has been the renovation of company information technology (IT) and the infrastructure it is built on. This paper describes the transformation of the internal IT infrastructure of IBM and some of the key initiatives that contributed to a smarter, optimized capability. We describe the activities, best practices, and lessons learned in server virtualization work, cloud computing incubation and evolution, workload location and data-center consolidation, and the transformation of the internal communications network of IBM. Realizing that transformation is an on-going process, we conclude the paper with an exploration of our plans to use analytics to enable the expansion and delivery of a real-time collaboration experience, another key IT service area.