The creation of an independent IBM software group (SWG) was strategically important for the following reasons: a) A category of software named “middleware” was emerging in the mid-‘90s. At this point SWG abetted IBM to emerge in the middleware market. b) SWG was also strategically important for IBM to help focus its software activities and prepare for a new age in distributed networked computing. ) SWG enabled IBM to develop middleware for multiple Oss’ and generate software revenues from as many Oss’ as possible, including Windows and UNIX. As a result SWG defeated the traditionally stronger hardware group for the first time in the history of the company with high profit margins. SWG creation was also important due to the growing commoditization of hardware business. d) As “e-Business” was becoming hot cake in the mid-‘90s, SWG helped IBM to strongly focus on building integrated solutions that exploit other IBM software in order to maximize performance or to take advantage of software synergies.
With formation of SWG and other acquisitions, IBM targeted several product offerings. Software Group has been the force behind herding the multiple business areas within the software group to have a common set of underlying services. e) SWG’s adoption of new platform would reduce the software development costs, enhance interoperability and usability, and make porting on other OSs’ easy. It would also encourage partners and ISVs to extend the platform with complementary products and technologies. This platform will increase the ecosystem of IBM products and thus increase IBM’s market reach. ) Is porting an exponential expense problem in the current situation? What are the implications? Yes, porting is an exponential expense problem in the current situation.
The Research paper on Software Quality Principles Work Product
2162 CIT - Software Quality Principles Semester 2 - 2002 Assignment 2 - Strategic Action Plan Due: 5. 00 pm, 25 October 2002 Team Members: Billy Bloggs Student Id: 123456 Jane Doe Student Id: 234567 Contents 1. Introduction 4 1. 1. Purpose 4 1. 2.Acronyms 4 1. 3. Reference 4 2. Overview 5 3. Executive Summary 6 4. Business Case for SPI Initiative 7 4.1. Business Rationale 7 4. 2. Guiding ...
Porting significantly increased the development and support costs. In order to port a new version of a product to a new operating system, it was necessary to rewrite a fraction of software, acquire hardware to test the products, develop new training materials and upgrade the skill set of support and sales staff. Hunting for skilled professionals with application development xperience across multiple OSs’ was extremely challenging. Porting expenses also added to the cost of improving the functionality of existing products. ISVs were very unhappy as they had to port their complementary products to multiple OSs’. ISVs did not have technical capabilities to build complementary products and solutions on top of it due to IBM’s diverse product portfolio. Smaller ISVs in particular were unable to bear the costing of porting. Estimates suggested that porting an application to another OS would increase R&D by 25%, technical support by 25% and sales and marketing by 5%.
This extra cost can be approximated to 6. 46% of total revenues per OS. 3. Is Java a help here? What are the limitations that may limit its use? Developing applications that run on multiple operating systems and ease of porting applications from OS to another, is one of the critical feature that a programming language should provide. Java, developed by Sun Microsystems, helped in making this possible, by the introduction of an abstraction layer, called Java Virtual machine (JVM).
Java applications, once developed could run in different operating systems without any additional modifications. JVM was made available for multiple operating systems which helped in reducing the cost of porting applications to different operating systems. Very soon java became popular in the software community, which resulted in more and more companies building their line of products in Java. Though Java quickly gained momentum, it raised new business and technical issues.
The Essay on Leadership: Theory, application, skill development
Over the past one year, the concept and skills that I have been able to learn is that of leadership. Leadership is an important aspect of life because in every situation in life, there is a form of leadership, although minor in some case that is observed. It is often experienced in homes, schools, businesses, organizations, and even governments among other areas in life. Although as an individual ...
On the business side, java weakened the stronghold of other application development tools, especially Microsoft’s Visual Studio. Also, market was becoming fragmented with the introduction of many similar java development tools, thus increasing the development costs for the ISVs trying to develop complements for java products. There were two issues created by Java on the technical side. First, Java provided Swing, its own graphic environment to provide consistent ‘look and feel’ across multiple OSs’ which resulted in customers losing familiarity with their native OS.
Second, Java’s Swing implemented their own set of graphic libraries adding computing overhead, making Java applications slower than those applications which directly used native operating system’s graphic libraries. 4. Is a single platform a utopia, a nightmare, or something in between? To develop your answer, think of this from the various points-of-view [POVs] of different IBM organizations and managers. Single platform across all IBM tools would be a utopia, but creating the platform by overcoming all the internal opposition at IBM and convincing the existing product lines to adopt new platform would be a nightmare.
Lee decided to build a single technology platform to eliminate redundant development effort and improve the usability and consistency of applications. Lee received mixed feedback from different management levels and was faced with lots of challenges. Upper management and development teams supported the idea as they understood the benefits the new platform would bring in. He faced lot of resistance from the middle managers, especially the management of the existing product lines. Coordination between each product group would be very difficult which would make the development of new platform cycles longer.
Also, each product groups would end up competing against each other as they try to influence the new platform. Lee did not have direct control over the VisualAge group and he had to figure out a way to convince the VisualAge group to adopt the new platform. Lee was also aware that convincing IBM partners to work on the same platform would be an even greater challenge, as they would have the fear of getting locked in a proprietary platform controlled by IBM. 5. How/why is Object Technology International [OTI] a leverage point in the single platform execution plan?
The Business plan on The SWOT Analysis Of Lenovo-IBM Acquisition
Case study: The acquisition case of American IBM Personal Computer by the Chinese computer company Lenovo. This article uses SWOT matrix to analysis the post-merger situation of Lenovo’s PC business and try to demonstrate a possible roadmap for future business. On December 8th of 2004, Lenovo announced its merging of IBM’s world personal computer (PC) business which included the ThinkPad line of ...
Building a single technology platform was strategically very important for IBM but Lee faced lot of resistance from the existing product teams and VisualAge group. Lee couldn’t count on any internal team to build this platform, as he feared that the team would be biased towards their product and add features to the platform favouring their product. He also felt that if the new platform replaced VisualAge, existing product lines would have less influence and the team managing the platform will gain power. To gain the momentum for his idea, Lee wanted to assign OTI with the job of building the platform.
OTI had skills in developing platforms and they had experience in developing a number of development tools in the past. OTI also gained experience and reputation in multi-OS development. Lee felt that out of all the teams inside IBM, OTI had the most experience in this area and they could quietly deliver the product. Lee selected OTI for 2 reasons: they had enormously skilled people in this space and as a separate subsidiary they weren’t subject to all of the controls and management. They choose Java as their programming language as it was gaining momentum.
OTI developed SWT ( Standard Widget ToolKit) to overcome the problems of Swings. They built the new platform which was named as Eclipse that provided multi-OS support, that had SWT integrated with it and, that included common functionality needed by most of the applications. They built Java IDE to show the value of the platform. Hence for all the above reasons, OTI was a leverage point for building the single platform. 6. How did the Java IDE help to sell the platform? How did the Linux OS support help/hurt the single platform?
To demonstrate the strength and value of the new platform, Lee and the leadership team decided to build a Java IDE. A producer-consumer feedback loop was set up between the platform and Java tools to drive the right things to the platform. Building Java IDE on top of the new platform helped them to discover areas of improvement quickly. It also helped them understand the needs of future customers which in turn allowed them to reiterate faster and improve the quality of the platform rapidly. IBM’s announcement that SWG would deliver its major products on Linux put pressure on the already strained VisualAge teams.
The Essay on Product Team Cialis: Getting Ready To Market
What was Viagra’s positioning in the marketplace 2002?•Viagra’s target market is a man in his 40 till ∞. •Market leader, because of no competition•Pfizer claims Viagra has been dispensed by 600,000 doctors and used by 20 million men (1*)•Viagra became a cultural phenomena, was widely discussed with friends, family and even media so much so that it can now stand in as a metaphor. • ...
ISVs and customers complained about VisualAge’s extensibility and this made top management teams put more pressure on the VisualAge team to address the extensibility issue. As Eclipse technology previews were circulated in SWG, skepticism regarding the platform began to dissolve slowly . This made VisualAge management team realize that the new platform would not only solve their requirement to port their products to linux, it will also help them save lot of development effort which can be redirected towards adding more functionality. . Why is drawing the line between the platform & app so hard? Explain how these decisions might be strategically important. As more and more products got built on Eclipse, it became more difficult to draw the line between what should be in the platform and what should be in applications since everyone wanted to extract out of the platform according to their specific application needs and requirements, which in turn varied from application to application.
IBM knew Eclipse needed a “conceptual integrity” or technical leadership that kept it focused on its primary role as a plug-in platform for diverse tools. It was a critical part of their design strategy that Eclipse included functionality common to most applications and provided plug-ins that could extend the platform to the customers who had specialized needs (Exhibit 7).
Specific product enhancement should not have to necessitate changes in the platform that were meaningless to some other product.
The platform was meant to be a flexible and not a product specific one, tailored to meet and support different application development needs through its plug-in mechanism and also encourage companies to eventually build on it. The platform was built in the first place to do away with the lack of “look & feel” in its app development tools faced by IBM’s customers (Exhibit 3) and also reduce the redundant development efforts that were rampant across the IBM labs by using the Eclipse architecture. Q8.
The Essay on Local Branch Customer Product Supplier
Overview. The process is designed to handle the interaction with customers and suppliers, and also deals with stock control. Invoice and payment data is recorded. For clarity I have noted down the following: o Head Office consists of - Product Management Finance Sales A Local Branch consists of - A Local Office Warehouse Distribution Preliminary List of Entities. In my top-down analysis of the ...
Has IBM leveled the playing field for competitors with Eclipse? Why/Why not? No. IBM did level the playing field with Eclipse for customers and partners, but not for its competitors as Eclipse was way better than other products available in the market. Eclipse’s major competitors were Microsoft Visual Studio and Sun’s NetBeans. Visual Studio had large customer following. However, it was dedicated to Windows OS only. On the other hand, NetBeans was lagging in performance when compared to Eclipse.
When Eclipse was made an open source project with a common public license, it leveled the playing field for customers and partners to use Eclipse as a common platform to develop its products on it as compared to its competitors. How much did the partners and customers contribute to the Eclipse platform itself was a big question, but Eclipse definitely did not level the field for its competitors. Eclipse being an open source with remarkable performance in fact gave customers and partners to choose Eclipse from the rest of the players in the market.
