IBM Impact 2013: Heroes of IT, Please Take a Bow

At last week’s IBM Impact conference, the focus was on “Technology in Motion,” and the keynote presentations were both inspiring and thought-provoking. The program celebrated some of the 400 IBM Champions from around the world who, as heroes of IT, help open new horizons and new audiences to technology.Wednesday’s keynote kept with the “tech in motion” theme, and the most stirring presentations involved how IBM is helping open up access to computing for underserved communities. Doug Schmidt of Pearson Publishing described how his company uses innovative technologies based on IBM WebSphere MQ*, IBM Message Broker*, and IBM Operational Decision Management* to bring higher education to students in over 70 countries and in a variety of formats.We also viewed a video presentation from P-TECH, the Pathways in Technology Early College High School, an innovative collaboration between New York public schools, the City University of New York, and IBM. The P-TECH schools (which include branches in Chicago and Idaho in addition to the original location in Brooklyn) bring together private-sector partners to design an academic program that’s heavy on high tech workplace skills. Students all have IBM mentors to help make sure they get the skills to land good, technology-oriented jobs. P-TECH program has been so successful that President Obama highlighted it in this year’s State of the Union Address: “We need to give every American student opportunities like this,” he stated. Is there a P-TECH school in my town for my kids?As the focus of Impact is WebSphere middleware, IBM highlighted some recent testing between generations of Xeon® processors and just upgraded IBM WebSphere* 8.5 vs. 8.1 performance gains. The nearly 260% performance gain with newer versions of software and hardware is huge for the middleware community and hopefully will be sufficient reason to upgrade both processor middleware versions. Details of new SPECjEnterprise2010 test results are detailed here: spec.org/jEnterprise2010.Intel and IBM have worked together for over 15 years to optimize software performance on the Intel infrastructure, and their collaboration and co-engineering on IBM WebSphere 8.5 has led to very impressive performance gains. And when it comes to technology in motion, it’s this kind of optimized joint engineering that creates new IT heroes. Watch this interview with our Intel hero, Pauline Nist (@panist), general manager of Enterprise Software Alliances, and learn more about the growing collaboration between Intel and software partners such as IBM.Follow Tim on @TimIntel and @IntelAdrenaline.