Yes, we CAMS

In the late nineties the most discussed issue by organizations of all sizes and industries, was the "millennium bug". Legend was that in the turn of the century, all the old systems, most still developed in Cobol, especially in the financial sector simply would stop working, causing chaos in banks, airlines, etc.. 15 years have passed and it is simply amazing to see the huge transformation the IT industry has passed. Today, the most discussed topics are Cloud, Analytics, Mobile and Social (CAMS). They consume most of the investments and time of CIOs .

Last year alone, the pace of change has increased dramatically. These are some of the moves that we have seen:

• The entry of a huge amount of new entrants, 
• Significant increase in the number of mergers and acquisitions, especially in the technology sector 
• Increase of investment by venture capital companies in projects for the corporate world

All of this, strongly influenced by the development of the concepts we call CAMS. The scale of change is large. There was a huge increase in the number of users, number of sensors spread across all corners of "smart" devices, such as smartphones, for example, channels, relationships, transactions and more. One result has been the generation of a data volume in 2013, of approximately 4 zetabytes (4 x 10 ^ 21), about 4 times that was generated in 2010. And CAMS is behind this whole process. 

IBM, in recent years, has closely followed this process with active participation. Acquired companies and developed solutions that are now part of the largest portfolio available in the technology industry. Let's see in more detail each of the components of CAMS:

Cloud

To begin, Cloud is not a technology, it is a "technology delivery modeo". For a customer this means in practice that he will not need to keep on their premises IT infrastructure. All the IT services he may need, will be accessed through web browsers on systems that are hosted on servers somewhere outside the company. Moreover, it will not demand s skilled IT staff. This can bring good savings, of course, depending on numerous other factors.

IBM is investing heavily in the area. Since 2007, the company has invested more than $7 billion in acquisitions to accelerate their cloud initiatives and to build a solid portfolio of solutions. Every day more than 5.5 million customer transactions are processed on the IBM public cloud. In addition, IBM holds 1560 patents on cloud solutions. IBM announced earlier this year, investments of $ 1.2 billion to expand its network of datacenters. This year IBM will have 40 processing centers in 15 countries on 5 continents. It is positioning itself to be the leading player in this segment that promises, for 2020, to be worth US$200 billion.

In 2013, IBM acquired the company SoftLayer, which is currently the foundation of the entire portfolio of cloud solutions company. The platform now serves over 2400 customers worldwide.

Analytics

Considering only the year 2013 were generated approximately 4 zetabytes information (do not ask me how it was calculated or even estimated). As we have seen, it is 4 times more than all that was produced in 2010. To make matters worse, much of the information is not stored in a structured way. A more detailed analysis shows that about 80% of what is generated is text in e-mails to tweets in posts, instant messages, videos, etc.. At the same time we have a much larger amount of information than in previous years, so we take something useful it is necessary to have the ability to analyze its meaning. And it is much more complicated than simply using a supercomputer with a large computing capacity.

IBM, with a long history of development of supercomputers, launched Watson. It came into the world in a computer format but in reality it is much more than that. Watson is a system composed of hardware, software and services, which inaugurated a new era in the history of computing, Cognitive Computing. We've talked about this project here and about its impact on modern computing. The fact is that it paves the road to make it possible to study huge amounts of information, in the most different formats in any field of science, for example, in medicine, oil exploration, education, research new drugs, etc. 

Mobile

"M" in CAMS comes from  Mobility. And this, in my opinion, is one of the next frontiers to be explored. Currently there are already tens of thousands of applications that exploit mobile devices like tablets or smartphones. There are billions of these devices and it is simply no longer possible to ignore the fact that people do not just work in their offices. Likewise it is extremely common to surf the Internet anywhere. Develop a system today, without taking into consideration the issue of mobility it is nonsense.

Furthermore, I argue that we are only at the beginning of the exploration of this frontier as more new devices are being used in mobile form not only smartphones and tablets. Just see the effort being made ​​by Apple and other companies to have their systems somehow embedded in automobiles. We have even the devices related to fitness. Each of these new devices generate more information that needs to be processed in some way so that it has value.

Every day it is more common that employees bring to their work devices such as personal tablets, for example. And companies need to take care of several aspects like provision processing power and, especially, safety. IBM has a number of solutions tested and approved to ensure cross-platform management devices to ensure safety and also to provide a development platform that facilitates the delivery of solutions for different mobile devices.

Mobility is not just to ensure that a system works on a smartphone. It is essential to ensure scalability, ensuring operation even with the most diverse internet bandwidths available, integration with other enterprise systems, and especially safely. 

Social is one of the strategic pillars of IBM, along with the "other CAMS" . Needless to say all the effort and investment that has been made ​​by the company in recent years in this area. The solution offered by IBM Social Business is today the market leader in the corporate world. Large corporations have implemented Social Business projects with IBM technologies, such as Connections, and today they reap the results of greater collaboration among their employees. Greater agility, commitment, information exchange and innovation are some of the benefits offered.

To enter the corporate world, investments were made in the areas of security, integration, scalability and mobility. Any solution offered by IBM today can be consumed directly at the customer premises, through the cloud or in a hybrid environment. This is a customer choice. 

CAMS

In conclusion, CAMS is much more than one product or a single solution. This is a "strategic vision", developed based on market research and the partnership with  IBM customers and partners worldwide. It is a vision of a new frontier being discovered every day and has the power to transform the corporate world as we know it. Not long ago we could not imagine how someone someday could work without using a phone. In a few years it will be hard to imagine how we worked without Cloud, Analytics, Mobile and Social.