Businesses around the world need to work more closely with their peers to keep abreast of challenging research and development schedules, according to analyst Forrester Research.

The company says there is an increasingly compelling need for businesses to share insights and different perspectives on new technologies, to cope with rapid changes in customer demand and to reduce failures.

IBM takes the issue so seriously that it has formed a technology innovation collaboration group, so that other companies can work with it and gain access to its technical expertise and knowledge when developing new systems and equipment.

Computing met IBM systems and technology group executive Bill Zeitler to discuss the impact that such collaboration will have on innovation.

Q How important is collaboration to innovation?

A Our own research has led us to conclude that companies across many industries will extend their employment of open standards technology in the development and manufacture of their own products, where previously they would have used proprietary systems.

We already work heavily with network equipment providers, such as Cisco, which have taken open standards technology from us and used it to get a base of products, then innovated on that to add value.

We also provide technology for things such as the Sony PlayStation 3, with the Cell processor. The graphic processing power of the Cell processor could well have applications for use in medicine for equipment such as CT machines and scanners, and in aerospace and defence for radar, for example.

Q To which sectors is this work particularly suited?

A We are targeting the areas of network appliances, consumer electronics, medical equipment, aerospace and defence first, not because we are going into those businesses but because we will be in the business of providing technology to those sectors.

The opportunities just for those areas will go from $73bn (£39bn) today to something like $115bn (£62bn) by the end of the decade.

Q Are the cycles for traditional innovation about to change completely?

A I believe they are. Everything is becoming digitised, and we have the access to open standards applied to more industry segments.

The question that companies are asking is that if everything is intelligent and everything is connected, how will that change the way they operate?

Companies are deciding that a new wave of innovation – with new kinds of products and new ways of bringing those products to market – can be opened up if you work to incorporate this open standards-based technology into your products.

The next wave of innovation is going to come from the application of technology into these new problems.

Q How could this kind of innovation push businesses’ IT infrastructures to the next level?

A There are two examples of ways that IT organisations can take advantage of these capabilities. One is virtualisation; in today’s server world market researchers would say that 70 to 75 per cent of the expense for an IT organisation is in the management of the technology, not the acquisition. That is almost exactly flipped from what it was 15 years ago.

So drastically lowering the cost of management and increasing asset use is going to be the first thing that is very important.

The second thing is the new blade computing environments. Besides having vendors involved in the blade.org alliance that we have formed, we also have WalMart involved, because it thinks this could be an important vehicle for having standards and for improving the efficiency of its store operations.

The same will happen with the banks. They will look and realise that they have all these different technologies, and that they can rationalise them.

Q What kind of role will standards play?

A Standards shorten the time it takes people to innovate. I think we are just at the beginning of this.

If you think back to the IBM PC compatible days, people brought out IBM PC compatible systems using standard components that went on to become a de facto standard.

That is really important, because if you could get a standard such as the IBM PC, then you get exciting accelerations in innovation.

Compaq brought out products and then Dell brought out all kinds of product – the innovation isn’t gated by one company, it is open.

That is what we are trying to do here. We have already opened the specifications on the blade systems themselves, and there are already more than 600 firms that make products for blade.

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