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Bits Blog: Behind I.B.M.’s Big Predictions

December 20, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

I.B.M. just issued its annual list of five predictions of developments in technology that it thinks will come true in the next five years. Like lots of predictive lists, particularly those that come around New Year’s, this is something of a pseudo-event that serves as an advertisement for the predictor’s own product or service. I.B.M.’s is no different in that regard, but it is worth looking at, both for the pedigree of who is doing the predicting, and what I.B.M.’s choices say about itself.

“To predict the next five years, you have to have a deep understanding of the last 50,” said Bernie Meyerson, vice president of innovation at I.B.M., and a highly regarded researcher in advanced microprocessor design and computer systems who oversees the list’s creation.

And so here are the predictions:

– Small amounts of energy created by actions like people walking or water moving through pipes will be captured, stored in batteries  and used to power things like phones, cars or homes. “You’ll see new ecosystems of generation and capture,” Mr. Meyerson said. “You generate 60 to 65 watts while walking. You could easily use that to power a phone forever.”

– There will be no more passwords, as increasingly powerful phones and sensors will store your personal biometric information, enabling machines to automatically know you are who you say you are.

– Better sensors on and inside the human brain will allow for mental control of objects. Already there are experiments involving moving cursors by thinking, but his prediction is that technology will go further. “You will observe thought patterns, which are highly personal,” he said. “You can use this to better understand stroke, or disorders like autism.”

– Powerful mobile devices, capable of precise language translation, will belong to 80 percent of the world’s population. While this is nearly intuitive, given the ever-lower cost of phones, the real breakthrough will be ubiquitous voice recognition and translation capabilities, which will make the phones highly useful to large populations who are illiterate, or who have languages that aren’t easily written with keypads.

(A question is: What would this mean for world markets and politics when ordinary people can easily communicate with each other despite speaking different languages?)

– Much the way powerful mobile devices store your biometric information and translate your language, personalized information filters and search engines will bring you only the information you want. “This will invert the premise of marketing,” Mr. Meyerson said. The phones “will start to be your advocate, recognizing what is near and dear to you and getting it. Instead of companies speaking to you, you will reach out to companies.”

While I.B.M. is conducting research in all of these areas, it makes neither phones, games nor commercial batteries. Why, then, should it be predicting the advent of such magic-seeming devices for the commercial periphery?

The most likely reason is that I.B.M. makes the software and services for the core networks without which all these devices would not function, commercially. If Mr. Meyerson’s ideas play out, the phones and sensors will do their magic only by interaction with an Internet almost unimaginably more complex than the one we have today. Few companies in the world will be able to engineer and run it at a large scale, and I.B.M. would almost certainly be one.

“With devices like this at the edge of the network, at the core you will need to have machines that can manage 30,000 complex commands a second and yawn,” Mr. Meyerson said. “We’ve spent over $15 billion buying analytics companies in the last five to seven years. It is a huge investment that has given us deep, deep scientific and technical skills that go way beyond the businesses these companies were in.”

I.B.M. is said to have over 300 people working just on the advanced math needed to make this much complexity something like a well-integrated whole. If its predictions come true, I.B.M. may need many more people than that.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=34d313fe704ec5807f92b7d22c24091f

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Bits Blog: Mark Hurd Is Still Intense

October 5, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Tony Avelar/Bloomberg NewsMark Hurd, co-president of Oracle.

You may have thought Oracle was a hard-charging sales organization even before Mark Hurd showed up. Turns out there was room for more.

“I focus on the same things I always have,” said Mr. Hurd, Oracle’s co-president, in an interview. “You have got to get the strategy right, you have to get the operations right, lined up from R.D. out to the field. I can tell you who is in charge, from R.D. to sales, all the way to deliver that value proposition to the customer.”

Mr. Hurd’s “strategy and operations alignment” approach served him well as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, until he was laid low by his board for expense account irregularities involving a female contract employee. Mr. Hurd resigned in August 2010, and re-emerged at Oracle a few weeks later.

Oracle OpenWorld

Dispatches from the conference.

Mr. Hurd has been holding brief meetings with tightly managed groups of American and overseas reporters during this week’s Oracle OpenWorld, his first significant encounters with the press since leaving H.P. He stayed tightly on message, delivering blunt assessments of what technology customers face, and how Oracle will serve them for all technology. It was a classic “state the need, state the solution” sales approach.

Holding up an Apple iPhone, Mr. Hurd states, “This is a Cray supercomputer.” It has the same processing power as that machine did in 1986 or 1987. “Over the next five years, three billion people will be mobile. There will be 65 zettabytes of data,” he says. (A zettabyte is about one million terabytes, or one sextillion — 10 followed by 20 zeros — bytes.) “The changes are real. Are people going to be doing more e-commerce? Yes. Are people going to be doing more social networking? Yes. Are people going to be more mobile? Yes. Do I think the corporate world is prepared? No.”

Oracle’s proposed answer to this problem, set forth Sunday night by Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive, and expanded upon by Mr. Hurd, is a computer architecture of hardware and software designed from the ground up to deliver maximum speed (using Oracle products, of course.) Always a close watcher of the balance sheet, Mr. Hurd said Oracle could deliver this as cost savings, bringing antiquated computer systems up to something like efficiency, or enabling customers to enter new businesses for growth.

“We have customers in banks who say, ‘I don’t care about performance, can you save me money?’” says Mr. Hurd. Other customers, he says, want performance.

Mr. Hurd has been traveling internationally as well as in the United States to take his message to corporations. It is not always comfortable, at least for the client. “I’ve spent a year trying to see a lot of customers, trying to learn our products and technology, trying to build a team,” Mr. Hurd says.

“You see a C.I.O., and it’s a good meeting, because he sees everything. One level below that, you are threatening someone’s business” within the corporation. Because of the tight integration of hardware and software, he said, people gluing systems together aren’t needed anymore. “There is a major transformation that has to occur,” he said.

It’s a rather strong message that works, apparently, when you are selling for a highly integrated, more competitive than ever, tech beast.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=25753eb28fcf6040c0ff940cb1b79795

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Bits: Big Medical Groups Begin Patient Data-Sharing Project

April 6, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The ideal of computerizing patient records is captured in the words behind the government’s aspirational acronym, N.H.I.N., for Nationwide Health Information Network.

The vision includes not only the efficient collection and use of digitized patient records to help physicians make smarter, more cost-effective diagnoses, but also the sharing of information by far-flung doctors and hospitals. A person walks into a clinic in Phoenix, say, and, with permission, her records from her hometown physician’s office in San Francisco are efficiently summoned with a mouse-click.

Across much of the country, that ambitious vision lies well in the future. After all, only about one quarter of the nation’s doctors even use computerized patient records today. The Obama administration is offering billions of dollars in incentives over the next five years — up to $44,000 per physician — to accelerate the adoption of electronic health records.

But five leading medical groups — pioneers in the use of electronic health records — are announcing on Wednesday a project intended to exchange patient information. It is intended as an elite forerunner of the national health information network, spanning several states and millions of patients.

The five are Geisinger Health System, Kaiser Permanente, Mayo Clinic, Intermountain Healthcare and Group Health Cooperative. They are calling their project the Care Connectivity Consortium.

“Our groups have all seen great results internally,” George Halvorson, chief executive of Kaiser Permanente, said in an interview. “The challenge is to connect with other systems.”

Many local and regional programs for sharing data among medical groups, known as health information exchanges, are already underway. Indeed, the legislation to stimulate the adoption of electronic medical records includes grants for setting up such community information exchanges.

But the consortium of the five big groups represents a step beyond those efforts in scale. For patients, Mr. Halvorson said, the most common uses would be referrals from one system typically to specialist physicians in another, or walk-in patients (the Phoenix-San Francisco example above).

The leaders of the five medical groups have worked on the consortium for the past six months, and it was put together in face-to-face meetings and with e-mail volleys, Mr. Halvorson said. The conversations began among the chief executives, and then the chief information officers were brought in.

“The C.E.O.’s had to make sure the C.I.O.’s didn’t think this was crazy or impossible,” Mr. Halvorson said. Some data-sharing among the five groups is intended to begin this year.

Are there business implications to the consortium? After all, some of the groups have their own insurance arms, including Kaiser, Intermountain and Geisinger. Electronic health records typically include reporting and billing information. Are the groups assembling a potential rival to national insurers like UnitedHealth, Aetna and Wellpoint?

Nothing of the kind, Mr. Halvorson insists. “This is totally focused on care,” he said.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=4e3252d2a648af4d8aed16fd6b577add

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