IBM and tech innovation

This morning I was listening to a fascinating talk by Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger from IBM that I downloaded to my iPod from ITConversations. He gave this talk at the Open Source Business Conference last month.

The focus of his talk was on innovation from an IT perspective. Alot of description about business process innovation within IT and how that maximizes return on investment. He talked too about self managing systems or, as IBM describes it, “autonomic computing” (for more, read the 8 elements of an autonomic computing system).

No question that managing the complexity of business processes, applying best practices and being in a position to benchmark oneself is key. But I was somewhat disappointed in the lack of meaningful tie-in’s to the open source community (though some were obvious) and yet, there hasn’t been any technology corporation that has done as much for the open source movement than IBM. From patents to Eclipse to their support for Linux, they’re strategically placing their bets which benefit anyone focused on open source.