Good Power: Leading Positive Change in Our Lives, Work, and World by Ginni Rometty

Author:Ginni Rometty [Rometty, Ginni]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2022-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

Betting Big on Cloud

Because we were late to the cloud, finding our place took time, more than we ever intended.

A cloud is basically standardized computing that a company doesn’t own or maintain but pays for as a service. In the early 2000s, companies began using cloud technology to run various systems. The first phase of the cloud was centered on the public cloud and was driven by consumer-oriented companies and applications, things like email, games, front-office tasks, and mobile shopping. The first public cloud company was Amazon, which essentially had been building a cloud infrastructure as far back as the 1990s; managing its infrastructure as part of its online retail operations became a competency that Amazon turned into a business with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2006. That same year, Microsoft began building its own cloud platform, Azure, which it launched in 2009. When I became CEO, IBM had various cloud products but had yet to build its own public cloud platform. Time was not our friend. As I said, other companies had a huge head start.

To scale quickly, we bought a public cloud company in 2013, worked to expand it globally, and hired more cloud talent. This gave us a solid public cloud foundation. But unlike our competitors, we didn’t have a consumer business or end-user applications to drive our existing customers to our public cloud. This was an inhibitor, try as we may, that we couldn’t do much about—we were who we were, an enterprise company.

We also discovered that the public cloud technology at the time wasn’t sufficient for our corporate clients’ mission-critical and more complex back-office applications. Moving our clients’ systems to the cloud demanded more sophisticated features and tighter security than consumer-oriented, public clouds. We had to decide what it meant for us to be a cloud platform that supported essential, mission-critical applications.

I listened to many opinions. Every day felt like a sprint and every setback a frustration because time was at a premium. We were already late! I had more sleepless nights, but also some early-morning epiphanies, as we came to understand IBM’s unique relationship with cloud technology.

We eventually arrived at the viewpoint that not everyone would move all their computing to several public clouds. In fact, if big corporate clients were to actually move their mission-critical and back-office applications to the cloud, three types of clouds were necessary: public, private, and a hybrid of the two. Finally, we knew where we needed to go, which was down a third path that didn’t exist until we came up with it. It was a relief, and it was exciting.

Think of a private cloud as using all the benefits of a public cloud, but on your own premises, so it’s potentially more safe and secure, although capacity is not unlimited. Because so many mission-critical applications already ran on our software, we understood this space well, and I again asked Arvind to take on a new responsibility and build our own private cloud. We quietly built one that clients could use with our IBM technologies.

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