developerWorks Interviews : Rod Smith
IBM vice president of Emerging Internet Technologies on the business of watching, encouraging, and leveraging 
new technologies
Part 1


LANINGHAM:	Welcome to the developerWorks interviews podcast series.  I'm Scott Laningham, developerWorks podcast
editor, and we're IBM's technical resource for developers offering a wide range of tools, code and education on IBM
products and open standards technology. 

Today our guest is Rod Smith, Vice President of Emerging Technologies for IBM.  Rod is a IBM fellow, a recognized
technical leader both within the IBM Software business, as well as across the industry.  His team's technological
innovations and cross industry collaborations have enabled the rapid adoption of technologies such as Web services, XML,
Linux, J2EE, next generation rich user collaboration technology and wireless applications.

Rod, welcome and thanks for making time for us today. 

SMITH:		Well, thank you for having me.  I appreciate being asked to do this.

LANINGHAM:	I hope I got all that right that I read earlier.

SMITH:	It's a lot.  I'll make one correction.  Emerging Internet technologies.  Emerging technologies is a little wider 
than I like to go.  I would stay pretty close to the Internet.

LANINGHAM:	OK. So let me ask you Rod, right up front obviously there's so much we could talk about with the 
perspective and exposure you have in your position and involvement with, as you say, emerging Internet technologies.  
Maybe we should start off with having you help define the course for us here by giving us a sense of what are the 
hot items on your mind right now.

SMITH:	Let me do that, but let me also put it in a little different perspective.  You know, emerging technologies is
always an interesting area, and I think from a technologist's point of view you kind of imagine all the technologies out
on the, you know, on the bleeding edge that you could get involved with or that you watch. 

And while my team does that, and I do that, I have another dimension to this.  And what you know I think makes it
rewarding for us is we get to talk to a lot of customers.  They ask many times myself and my team, you know, they'll 
describe areas that hurt their heads as they say.  You know, these are things that are hurting my head, and gee, IBM, 
if you happen to come across something that looks like it might address this, I'd really, you know, please keep me in 
mind, come back and talk to me. 

LANINGHAM:	Right.

SMITH:	And so we think about emerging technology not just from the bleeding edge things that we might like, that, you
know, that might be, you know brain entertaining for us, brain expanding, as opposed to what do customers find
value in, what do they think of, what things can we associate some of the emerging technologies that we think customers
would find useful in a fairly short time frame, and you know short is not months, but you know we try to look 12 to 18
months out when we start to evolve some of the technologies. 

So what's fun about this is, with all technologists you like to know you're on the right track.  You'd like to know that 
what you are doing can get adopted.  Emerging technologies is kind of a useless area unless you get high adoption.

LANINGHAM:	Right.

SMITH:	So being able to get that feedback from customers, both positive and negative, is great to do it early on.  So
we like the fact, when we can find technologies, go in and engage customers; and since we're not directly in the product
teams, we get a different answer in many cases than sometimes the product folks do, which is usually features and
functions that either aren't working or they need added as opposed to a dialogue about, gee, this technology would be
good for such and such part of my business. 

And so that's very helpful.  Or the other hand we thought this would be good and it's just not working out right.  And
both answers for us are excellent, because we get insights into their business and you know more of the problem or more
of the opportunity they're doing. 

LANINGHAM:	Let me ask you something about that, then, since you were bringing that up before we jump into that
other stuff about hot buttons right now.  You know, from a developer perspective, I'm wondering how important you think
it is for developers today ... well maybe it's this way, has the speed of change and evolution of IT gotten to a point 
where it's even more critical to be aware of this stuff than it was in the recent past, or has that really changed, do 
you think? 

SMITH:	I think it is more critical.  I think our customers today do not want to be surprised when new technology, the
disruptive technology shows up.  And they're investing time and money into understanding technologies more than they
did, you know, five, ten years ago.  So and there also is the nice part of this is that they're willing to go out and
do, support proof=of-concepts that either reinforce the value proposition of a technology or decide that maybe it's not
useful yet.  So engaging in customers today is, you know, if you don't understand certain technologies that are coming
up or don't have an opinion that you can express with the customers-- and these are opinions, as technology evolves they
always get reshaped as you're going through this -- I think you miss a great dialogue opportunity with customers.

LANINGHAM:	Yeah, even the phrase emerging technologies is an interesting phrase.  Using the word emerging, because
emerging, I think sometimes we get this feeling that it, like you said, it represents the bleeding or far out front edge
and also that it denotes a certain amount of speed. But the word emerging does not necessarily, does not necessarily have 
a speed connotation to it, does it.

SMITH:	You're right.  And part of this is you think about service-oriented architectures.  We started the first tool
kits on that back in, oh, I think the first presentation we did was early mid '99 and tool kits were out in 2000. 

And customers started to see the value of it, you know, from an emerging standpoint.  But it was going to be, you know,
five, six, seven years worth of transformations to bring their business along. 

So we were careful, kind of a fun time when we named my group initially emerging technologies.  IBM would, you know,
initially say Rod's got an ad tech team.  I hate the word ad tech, I can't stand it, because it's very kind of ego-driven.  
I'm a smart guy or I've got a smart team and we're going to create some technology and then go sell it to the
marketplace. 

And emerging is no, we think about this from a community aspect.  We look at technology.  We get involved in technology. 
And hopefully some of it has business value over, you know, some adoption cycle, which could be six months.  It could be
seven years. 

And, you know, we stick with them.  And we try to keep growing them to show the value.  So you're right there isn't the
time dimension.  And you know my folks are, if we've got web services going, a number of years ago I was ready to move
on to some other technologies, and customers were still digesting, you know, what we put on the table.  And the answer
is from my team's standpoint, we stay where the customer is. 

And I think something that many technologists miss, you might have a great idea for, you know, a technology, you see a
technology down the pipeline coming up, but if the customer's plate is pretty full on things they're doing right now,
chances are they're not going to be interested. 

So rate and pace here, understanding how much customers are willing to invest, how they prioritize it in their business,
as you're looking out at emerging technologies is also another critical factor.

LANINGHAM:	Absolutely.  That's good.  Thank you for that perspective on all of that.  I think that's something that
we sometimes we rush beyond that explanation and understanding of that whole concept, you know. 

SMITH:	And so let me talk, so let me give a couple of technologies that are interesting to me right now, and I'll give
you one more little caveat.  When we start looking at a technology, we always start with what's the business value.  And
you know it's a fun discussion for you know technologists and we've got one very good business development person that
works with us, and it's mostly a dialogue on our part -- what do we see the business value is. 

And then if we finally, you know, kind of circle the wagons and agree to it, then we start to look at the technologies
and we can evaluate them.  So it makes it a lot less emotional or religious on a technology when you can ground it into
business value. 

One of the technologies which is becoming very hot right now is Ajax.  And what's interesting is you know Ajax has, in
terms of technology, isn't a new technology.  It's been around for probably, you know, four years, utilized in a number
of different products. For at least the last four years customers have told me that the web experience isn't very good. 

And they wouldn't trade it. The browser is extremely important to them.  But from a business point, there's a hideous
number of e-business transactions, e-shopping experiences that don't close. 

A number I want to say is in the 50, 60th percentile of people not completing their shopping experience. 

LANINGHAM:	Right. 

SMITH:	So customers were saying, you know, I'd like a better user experience to drive revenue.  So this
wasn't I want a user experience for, you know, advertising, which you see a lot with flash nowadays.  Which is very
good.  But it was how can they measure, you know, revenue.  How can they increase their revenue with this?  But they
said, by the way, I don't want a proprietary technology. 

I need something based on open standards, adopted by, lots of vendors.  Easy and approachable, and, oh, yeah,
of course kind of an extension to the browser, you know all wonderful ideas, and but nothing four years ago really hit
that.  And so as you saw Ajax coming up, it was interesting that at a Gartner conference in December of last
year, Darryl Plumber asked the audience -- this was a service oriented architecture conference and an Open Source
conference -- asked folks what technologies are on the horizon. 

And when he asked the Ajax question, this was, oh, probably six to 700 folks in the room, about two thirds of them
raised their hand and said Ajax.  Now, if you asked them what Ajax was, they probably couldn't tell you from a
technology standpoint. 

But they saw what Google maps was doing.  Google maps kind of set the stage for the fact there were new business
opportunities, new applications that could be created to bring in new business value. 

And so Ajax now had a, you know, a business connotation to it rather than just reproducing in some cases the desktop
experience through the browser, which is what we started with earlier Ajax pieces. 

So that's one technology that customers, enterprise customers are interested in.  And earlier this year we announced with 
I think 13 companies -- Google and Yahoo, BEA and Zend and Oracle and others -- about getting behind the user
experience more from a community standpoint. 

The great thing about websites today is the visual branding can, it's a fashion statement, can change and grow and take
on different, you know, different visual experiences depending on what audience you want to hit.  So we think Ajax is 
going to offer people and developers and businesses ways that they can have a spectrum of user experiences, depending on 
their audience. 

And vendors, as I mentioned, thought this was a good idea, and instead of one tool kit there will be a number of them
that we think there will be demographics, developer demographics forming around. 

Bigger than that, though, many of the customers themselves started to contact vendors and say I like this idea of open
Ajax, we think this is a good direction.  And that actually culminated in a meeting kind of forming a group of now 30 
companies called Open Ajax Alliance.  What are the technologies that we think are part of Ajax going forward, what's kind 
of put together a road map of evolution as that matures.  And part of that is for all of us to grow, you know, the adoption 
of Ajax as vendors, the more we can help customers feel that Ajax is a safe bet, the more we'll all be able to find new 
business opportunities. 

LANINGHAM:	We should mention that there is a lot of great Ajax content on developerWorks and one series titled 
"Mastering Ajax" in the Web architecture zone has been, I think, our most popular series to date. Just great traffic to
that one. And if you go to ibm.com/developerworks and search for mastering Ajax, that series will come up.

SMITH:	It shows a lot of interest in this whole area of how do you do mash ups, how do you those kind of applications 
that take advantage of kind of this programmable web phenomena that you can put a, you know, a pretty, an interesting, 
if you will, dashboard together or user experience that has compelling value. 

And I think that's where we'll see a lot more of this go, is,  around what we've kind of loosely classified as Web
2.0,  a set of technologies now that are actually going to help us, I think, create applications that couldn't, we
couldn't afford to create before because of the availability of the content through services and the user experience
through things like Ajax.

LANINGHAM:	Rod, I know we don't have a lot of time to go into depth on other things but what about other Open
Source projects or activity zones that are of real interest to you right now? 

SMITH:	Very interested in the whole, you know, where syndication is going.  RSS is huge out there.  And I'm a big fan
of Atom work and the Atom publishing protocol and when you start to think about the types of applications people are
going to be doing, we're really empowering content developers kind of a next generation if you will of developers. And
they're not the same as you'd think about as programmers in the past. 

You know if we kind of put a scale up, you'd think of programmers as folks that do lots and lots of code and manipulate
a little bit of content, proportionally. 

The web is coming about, programmable web, lots of content and how can I manipulate that in the smallest amount of code
is possible.  So this whole area of empowering the content person, being able to help them create these solutions  -- and 
a lot of them are going to come through as data feeds or ways not only I can do feeds but I can do updates.  And so the
Atom model we like around APP we think is very compelling.  Distributed content management.  Light weight distributed
content management for a broad range of solutions out there that people couldn't create before.

LANINGHAM:	Those lines are really starting to blur, aren't they, between the coders and content providers? 

SMITH:	They are, and I think this is where you know my interest for scripting has come up.  I like PHP.  I'm obviously
a big Java fan since I helped us get on the road with Java, but it's like the audience is expanding.  It's not an
either/or.  It's hopefully we'll see less of a tribe mentality around languages and more thinking about choosing the
right scripting language, the right tools for the job you want to do.  If you're transactional oriented, the type of
application, J2EE is good for that.  If it's content oriented, you know, there's Lamp and there's Atom and there's
things that help you do that. 

But it's very, since we're doing REST and SOAP they're approachable in terms of putting these together.  So I find that
very interesting, and customers, again, this is one of the things I think that's fascinating, mashups and mash up camp
earlier this year, you know, I think an InfoWorld person quoted the term "enterprise mashup", and within a week I
think I had 20 requests from customers saying, "we like this thing, what is an enterprise mashup?"

And I said it's a term that people are thinking about not just in terms of external assets like Google Maps or other
services but mashing them together with internal assets.  But it's just a term yet.  We're still working through that.

And customers say we like that.  Where is the direction to that?  And I think we're early on in mashups, but the idea
that they're on, think about IT.  You know, poor IT gets a request from a business unit, more than likely they can't
even begin a project unless they've got six months as a minimum."

LANINGHAM:	Right.

SMITH:	Right?  And now the problem is the web's coming along where maybe business relationships don't last six months. 
The technology is not the inhibitor.  Business relationships can change. 

How do you put together a solution that can help a business relationship grow quickly, or, you know, not
spend too much money that if it doesn't pan out you don't feel like you lost your shirt on it. 

And so enterprises are saying, you know, maybe I'm using one criteria for all applications I need when there's multiple
criterias.  Maybe I should be thinking about what these mashups are doing and looking at the technology underneath
them, and thinking, you know, is that a better match for some of my business in ecosystem requirements coming down the
road.

LANINGHAM:	You're listening to a developerWorks interview with Rod Smith, Vice President of Emerging Internet 
Technologies for IBM. This interview is continued in Part 2.

{END OF PART 1}