IT Leveraging the Business Advantage in IBM - Case Study Example

and Sur Due business advantage through it leverage A CASE STUDY Management Summary The information technology plays a pivotal role in influencing business success in modern times and it has to be regularly reviewed and modified according to the requirements of industry. Requirements and choice of hardware and software has to be correct at the very outset and the focus should be fluid enough to shift with the requirements of the customer and the availability of better and cost effective products with advances in technology. The IT (Information Technology) sector plays a prominent role in forecasting and setting rational and profitable targets for any organization in close cooperation with the finance and executive departments of any organization in the present era. The presence of fierce competition and cost restraints in the present world economic scenario make a proactive approach to envision the future results beforehand and implement appropriate measures to achieve desired results and targets is absolutely necessary. In this report the role played by the IBM Corporation in developing such strategies to enhance multifarious businesses with hardware and software solutions has been studied. The latest innovative ideas implemented by this leader in automation and IT have been incorporated in the report. Practical implementation of an IT strategy by a leader in an online gaming industry has been studied and researched up to some extent from the results obtained by it after choosing a particular IBM product. Introduction Information Technology (IT) has grown at a tremendous pace in the last decade and has left no aspect of business or human life untouched. Banking, Healthcare, Education, The Stock Market, etc. are on the verge of being exclusively run using IT. The growth in the IT industry however has not been uniform, as advances in hardware and software development have been influenced by the exclusive needs and requirements of large corporation and governments. This has produced a haphazard pattern of growth in the IT sector and the experts in the field have initiated efforts only very recently to restructure it to be uniform, efficient as well as cost effective. Almost all businesses in the developed and the developing countries are being run using latest and the most modern aspects of IT. Institutions like banks, the hotel industry, fast food chains, fast moving consumer goods industry and others have surpassed their competitors by miles using IT to leverage their businesses. One such organization is the IBM Corporation which was the pioneering organization in ushering the computer age in this century. The corporation has identified vital issues for innovation in its IT strategy and is forging ahead with plans to transform the IT infrastructure to generate business advantage. The following paragraphs will discuss what strategies they have envisioned and how they plan to implement them in the future. Successful implementation of an IBM innovation has helped an online gaming company ‘WorldWinner’ achieve tremendous success in the last few years and how it has achieved this success will be discussed. History of IBM Corporation IBM, short for International Business Machines was started more than 100 years ago as a venture aimed at handling information in business. The company designed and developed many products to ‘record, process, communicate, store and retrieve information’. (www-03.ibm.com). It has gradually emerged as a world leader with the development of ‘powerful computers and vast global networks’ (www-03.ibm.com). The company started of with the development of need based office machines like time keepers, automatic tabulators, calculators, typewriters etc. and was the founder of the modern day daily use PC (Personal Computer). Many software and programming languages like FORTRAN are attributed to IBM. It contributed to NASA’s (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) space programs automation software as well as hardware which were vital for many of the space missions throughout the century. IBM also is claimed to be the world’s most inventive company which has hundreds of patents in its name. The corporation now has global presence and although working in a multi lingual international society, it has delivered hardware as well software to countries across the globe and brought about international uniformity. The corporation is not resting on its laurels and is bringing forth new innovations and changes in approach as well as designing software to enhance productivity. Latest endeavors - IBM Corporation All businesses now demand ‘higher operating efficiencies, business growth and an enhanced shareholder value’ (IBM document). The IBM Corporation has focused on the increasing role the CIO’s (Chief Information Officers) are playing to implement new innovations in IT itself as a business. It has tried to find ways and means to enhance effects of information technology on productivity in other businesses, which are facing complications and obstacles in their IT infrastructure under the present constraints of budget and an unfavorable world economic scenario. Enterprise IT management strategies have been initiated to unify and simplify IT management for better business results. Many CIO’s feel that the present IT infrastructure has been lopsided due to short term fixes and ‘day to day’ demand fixtures of emergent problems by individual organizations. This has resulted in lack of uniformity in IT mechanisms and a rise in operational and maintenance cost. The IBM Corporation has thus focused on ‘on demand’ IT solutions which are tailor made for a particular organization so that the company saves money by avoiding unnecessary expenditure by depending on traditional IT hardware and software. The IT infrastructure can thus be individualized for a particular organization to run its core components while other generalized operations can be handled by outsourcing to the experts of a specific field which can result in better overall cost effectiveness. An example of how an IBM IT model has helped leverage business towards more success is given in the following example. Online Gaming Industry – ‘WorldWinner’ An interesting case study of how the IBM Corporation has been responsible for the success of a modern IT based industry is that of www.worldwinner.com which has achieved stupendous success in recent years and is a provider of cash games to big networks like AOL (America Online), MSN (Microsoft Network) and POGO (www-01.ibm.com). This gaming site was acquired by ‘FUN Technologies’ which already had another successful online gaming site, ‘SkillJam’ up and running successfully. After the acquisition the company has crept to the number one spot in the industry. It offers online gaming to registered users and hosts a wide variety of card, strategy, arcade and sports games. Joe Bai, the Chief Information Officer of the ‘worldwinner’ games claims his site to be the most predominant one on the internet for skill based games (www-01.ibm.com). It offers simple games to play for free and offers an option to upgrade to a membership status where you earn cash by winning games. The reason behind the success of this online gaming site is its capability of delivering twice the number of games of any competitor due to the IT strategy used by its CIO, Joe Bai. The success has been achieved using IBM Informix Dynamic Server (IDS). It has achieved a 100 % increase in the number of games hosted in just one year after the implementation and commissioning of the IDS (www-01.ibm.com). The result is that in online gaming it has emerged as a global powerhouse of online games with a network of 30 million players worldwide (www-01.ibm.com). The secret behind the success is the ability to deliver exceptional speed, response and availability using the IDS server since 2001 (www-01.ibm.com). The 100% increase in number of concurrent players and games per day has been achieved without any additional expenditure on hardware, a 20% reduction in time required to bring new products from the developers to the consumer and less than 2 seconds time to load for service critical pages (www-01.ibm.com). The company is targeting another 100 % increase in its turnover by upgrading to Informix Version 10 on a 64 bit Linux operating system to increase the capacity of games delivered per minute (www-01.ibm.com). The speeds obtained by the company using this strategy have now become a benchmark for the competitors. The strategy adopted by the company has provided it with the flexibility as well as scalability to add more games and offer special tournaments and events to its subscribers without the need for upgrading its hardware. The above example denotes how intelligent and timely application and choice of the appropriate IT infrastructure can help a company to grow and profit from its decisions and stay at the top due to continuous implementation of novel ideas and strategies. Shifting to an open source platform like Linux is a timely and wise decision of the company as it would help minimize operational costs. Selecting the appropriate server capable of handling high traffic at the initial stage itself was the right decision as it propelled the company towards achieving 100% growth in a single year with prospects of replicating the results in the coming years. Online gaming is a rapidly emerging industry and with the availability of wifi networks across the globe and increased traffic of people worldwide has established it as an important entertainment industry with the world cyber games tournaments becoming a regular and specialized affair. Summary In this report an analysis of how the innovations in IT industry are helping to leverage business advantage at a generalized as well as operational level has been performed. The present scenario where company specific and on-demand hardware and software have become the hallmarks of future thrusts in the IT industry have been highlighted. The role played by the CIO has assumed greater significance in the present era where he has to play a proactive role in implementing strategies beforehand in order to make a business successful in the fiercely competitive markets today. Dependence on traditional, complicated and sometimes unnecessary IT infrastructures of yesteryears has to be done away with and only industry specific and targeted IT strategies need to be acquired with outsourcing of other common tasks which are more economical to be run by experts in respective fields. IBM is one such corporation which has continually improvised since its inception almost a century ago. It has emerged as the undisputed leader in hardware and software technology and has infiltrated almost all kinds of industry the world over. The report has studied the impact of an IBM product in leveraging the business to stupendous growth in an online gaming company ‘Worldwinner’ and how it has emerged as a global giant in its field by adopting appropriate IT strategies. References: History of IBM, Online Article available at: http://www- 03.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/history_intro.html IBM Document,IBM Global Technology Services, 2006,Transforming the IT infrastructure to generate business advantage: the CIO agenda to enable innovation that matters. Available online in pdf format at: www-935.ibm.com/services/us/cio/outsourcing/optit_wp_gts_transforming.p df WorldWinner delivers twice as many games each day with IBM Informix Dynamic Server. Online Article available at: http://www- 01.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/LWIS-6YVL3G? OpenDocument&Site=dmmain&cty=en_us Read More