A tale of two IBMs: Big Blue vs. IBM Watson.

I had an interesting experience with IBM a few weeks ago, or actually two very different IBMs. It started with attending the IBM Business Analytics Summit at the Plaza Hotel here in NYC.

I had just read the cover story in Barron’s on IBM’s CEO Ginni Rometty: Reinventing Big Blue. “A $100 billion ship that is facing declining revenues and fierce competition at every turn.” Rometty spoke about the need to focus on growing their data and analytics business to “the cloud”, where IBM is the leader in private cloud computing.

Beyond some of the obvious revenue and stock valuation problems, IBM has is another big issue - the widely held perception of the firm being a large enterprise solution-focused behemoth. None too nimble nor quick, not very interested in small start-ups, nor up and coming young web developers. They don't seem to offer well publicized developer summits like Apple's Developer Conference held recently or the Google I/O conference set for later this week.

IBM looks like a giant company, mostly interesting in doing business with other huge corporations and government agencies. It take these mega contracts to move the needle on a multimillion dollar income statement, like the massive US Defense Department Healthcare System Modernization contract that just went up for bid valued at $ 11 billion.

The Business Analytics Summit reinforced this perception for me. Compared to the downtown NYC Silicon Alley way of doing business I’ve become accustomed to – which is collaborative, friendly, hip and open in every way – IBM could not have been more different and frankly less relevant. 

The event was dominated by mostly unfriendly people in business suits, lots of PCs and Blackberry devices, with very little social media streaming of event content. Add to that way too many IBM product acronyms being served up like a fire hose - SPSS predictive analytics, the Cognos performance management platform and IBM risk management solution algorithms - my mind went numb in short order despite the luxurious event venue.

They did lots of talking at the audience, telling them how wonderful IBM data solutions are. Very little back and forth dialogue with the audience, just loads of power point presentations with well rehearsed scripts. It seemed to be the IBM-way or the highway.

To add insult to injury they did not even offer free Wi-Fi ($14.99 fee) so I did not use my laptop, and when they invited me to get more information at analyticszone.com I found a website that was not even mobile optimized. I signed up for an IBM analytics beta trial on the site – they acknowledged my registration – and I am still waiting to hear back from them. Nice.

However not all is lost for IBM. It comes down to what web developers call delivering a superior UX or user experience.

That evening I went to a downtown Meet-up at Turn to Tech – a hip IOS coding school in the Flatiron District in the heart of Silicon Alley to learn about IBM Watson.

It was sponsored by Teddy Angelus from BlueWater Labs – a NYC based data / tech consulting firm that specializes in building communities. This effort is a tangible way IBM is reinventing itself – with a cognitive technology that processes information more like a human than a computer. The IBM Watson business proposition is simple: It interacts with humans on human terms.

At the very least the young IBM Watson team at the Meet-up interacted with the attendees like real people. They engaged in a delightful conversation about the possibilities of

IBM Watson to help people work better and smarter across a wide range of applications. They explained IBM Watson runs algorithms on data – and conducts probabilistic analytics to reach conclusions.

People at the event asked hard questions, and the Watson team admitted when they did not have all the answers. They simply asked people to consider the possibilities, from mobile device programming to business and medical uses. I learned that Watson is not your average analytic tool. It can search and sift through huge amounts of data to deliver a relevant data set with simple visualizations and info-graphics in split seconds that show key data points. Wow.

IBM is putting its money behind Watson, with a massive new presence in the heart of Silicon Alley at 51 Astor Place in New York City, hiring a reported 2,000 new people and a commitment to seed venture investments to the tune of $ 100 million to use the IBM Watson Developers’ Cloud. 

Now that will get the attention of the downtown Silicone Alley Crowd for sure.

I spoke with William Sennett – one of the new faces of IBM Watson at the event. He’s been brave enough to pose a poignant question in his Linked In profile: “How can we take social technology, big data and analytics and marry them to create a scalable personalized experience?” A relatively recent graduate of Duke University with a Mechanical Engineering degree, it appears Sennett is asking the right kinds of questions, rather than preaching canned corporate solutions.

You can check out IBM for yourself at the next "Introduction to IBM Watson" Meet-up on June 25, 2014 at Turn to Tech.

I’m not sure how I will use IBM Watson in the future when it comes to marketing, but I am sure that this is the face of IBM that I will look forward to doing business with, in what ever form it comes.