developerWorks Interviews : Rod Smith
IBM vice president of Emerging Internet Technologies on the business of watching, encouraging, and leveraging new technologies
Part 2


LANINGHAM:	And certainly the business, the speed of business and the demands of business on the Internet don't always 
allow for the traditional development curve anyway, do they? 

SMITH:		No, they don't.  No, I'm reading a good book right now about mapping.  I think it's called Elsewhere Mapping,
and you know one of the interesting comments was that Google's made everybody or a group of folks user cartographers,
and they made a quote from a famous cartographer, mapping is too important to be left up to cartographers.  I think
probably applications are too important to be left up to IT. 

And what's happening is you're seeing, you know, from Google maps and some of the mash ups, those are very interesting
applications people are building, right, but they're not something that would fall into one domain, like an
enterprise or an IT. 

Why aren't we empowering more folks to be able to do those types of things?  And so you know I think we're making, I
don't know what to call them, maybe we just continue calling them mash ups. They're going to have tremendous value as people
look towards admitting and consuming information and content to go, you know, build dashboards and other things.

LANINGHAM:	You know, whenever we talk about this kind of thing, it brings to mind the phrase that everybody is
almost beating to death now, which is based on that title of Thomas Friedman's book, "The World is Flat."  And the
flattening of this, the flattening of that.  And he's talking a lot about the flattening of the economies and business
interactions across the globe and personal interactions, but you know hearing you talk about this makes me think that
we're also witnessing in some way the flattening of activity zones within traditional IT as well, and where there's a
lot of cross over going on and a lot of people getting their hands into, you know, activity on other sides of the fence
that they never really got into before. 

SMITH:	I think, you're right.  And what I was talking to a person in California last week that said I'm not a
programmer, but let me tell you what I've been doing.  And you know they start that way.  I'm not a programmer.  I don't
do this.  But with a little Java script but a little PHP this is what I can put together.  And they're amazed what they
can do and that's great, and I think that's important from a couple dimensions. 

One is that the more we let the domain experts, the folks who are, you know, in the business, whatever business they're
doing, get closer and involved in these type of solutions, the more we understand about other things they need.  So it
does break down a lot of barriers.  We're doing some things kind of around enterprise mashup tooling, mashup makers,
and the dialogue is great.  I mean, when we sit down and talk with customers, they say, you know what, here's another pain
point.  And it's a pain point coming from the businessperson.  And you're going hmmm, I wonder if we can help on that. 

So you know it's exciting now because I think there's kind of a, you know a rejuvenation coming of we're not out of
application people write, the SAPs, the PeopleSofts and Siebels -- we think of those as being the big application
procurement and supply chain -- but guess what, there's a huge amount of applications out there that aren't, you know, are
at the domain expert level, that are remixing the content into ways that can help their business. 

And I think we'll see that continue. 

LANINGHAM:	Do you think there's any kind of worry out there among some that this is moving at a speed which might
result in the you know the weakening of a position of solid application development, or is the Open Source movement in
general sort of the answer to that in terms of policing it and keeping things solid? 

SMITH:	I don't think there's a weakening as there is a way that you'd like to see folks involved in the whole process
more.  And so I have one company whose group of business development folks did a mashup and basically went back to IT
and said, you know, we got this done, can we go have it deployed and the IT shop looked at it and it was something that
they were given to do.  And again it was maybe they get started in six months and this team did it in about three weeks. 

And it stopped the IT guys for a second because, you know, they didn't have a good answer.  Maybe we should go put this 
out for them.  But it also, you know  they, in going back to the group, said you know is this just for 12 20, 100 folks 
or is this for 200,000 folks, you know, be careful and tell us more about it. 

So I think we'll see this evolution where people can do mashups quickly and for, you know, a certain size audience it
will work just final.  In other cases it will be a great proof of concept, a great way that IT can look at and
businesses to look and say that was a great idea.  Now that we know the business value, we've got it proven,
let's go back and reimplement this in a way that can be utilized broader across our organization. 

And we've not had that before.  We always kind of you know put charts together and said this will be really good and
then sold ourselves on it, and then hopefully, you know, cross your fingers it has the right value. 

Well, now we can get pretty close with mashups, closer approximation of the business value, to determine what
additional investments we should make.  And I think that's going to be very healthy for us. 

LANINGHAM:	When you think, your crystal ball, what does it tell you about the future of Open Source versus, you know,
traditional shrink wrapped license product approach, and are the two kind of headed for emerging into what you might
think eventually may just become the new norm, it's just a third alternative in a sense? 

SMITH:	Well, I think there's two things you kind of keep separate, or at least I do.  I mean Open Source is assets that
I can use and sometimes those assets are great for, you know, small business that, you know, Lamp stack or something
that can put together and you know I can run my business on. 

But we also think about those Open Source assets that can be blended into a WebSphere, for example, and you know
WebSphere is pretty much the poster child for helping Open Source communities and using Open Source. 

In that case it's more than just Open Source.  There's other things the customer asked for for either quality of service
or high availability or, you know, the performance that's necessary and customers, as they're fond of saying,
I want one neck to wring.  When something goes wrong, if you're a larger corporation, you want to be on the phone to a
vendor and say you know fix the problem.  Right?  And so I don't think there's an either/or.  I think it's, you know,
what's your economic model and what's your criteria that you need for your software and there will be places where some
Open Source is good.  It's got the right affordability model where you'll take care of it yourself, and then there will
be other places that as your business grows or other businesses pick up solutions that they say it proves the business
value and now where is the commercial version of this. 

And I find the fact that you know when I talk to customers on Open Source, they're actually thinking about it even from
a community aspect.  Gee, you know, you guys in kind of the deep down plumbing have created these communities, very
vibrant communities, lots of great innovation going on.  How do we emulate that?  How do we take advantage of that?  How
do we remap that into our space? Because we'd like to create that same, you know, that same excitement, that same 
innovation spirit between, you know, within our ecosystem, a business ecosystem, or a cross business ecosystems. 

So you know we'll see if that continues, too, because I think that will offer another venue when you think about Open
Source, when you look at finance or travel or health, that start to break down the barriers between industries where
Open Source can help and then vendors can find the right solutions that, you know, meet the customer's end requirements
from a business standpoint.

LANINGHAM:	That's great.  You know, Rod, I'd love to ask you, we're about out of time, but I'd love to ask you a more
personal question, not super personal, but if you'd if you'd allow me to throw it out there and see what you feel
like answering in regard to this.

How would you describe, you know, in a summary, in a summary way, how would you describe the experience you've had heading 
up to the kind of thing you're doing now within IBM, and did you imagine yourself in this position at some point in the 
past, or you know I'm asking this from the standpoint of those who were saying gosh I'd like to be Rod Smith some day.

SMITH:	Oh, boy.  Well, no, I didn't imagine, you know, myself doing exactly this today.  But interesting kind of some
of the technical career choices I made early on kind of led me here. 

So what I mean by that is when I joined IBM, I thought about what I felt I wanted my career to be, whether I was with
IBM or not with IBM.  I enjoy working at IBM.  But my career is in software. 

And IBM is the place I choose to work.  And each year I get out of my comfort zone.  I pick an area of technology that I
want to delve into. 

So I've always been a Mac guy.  So I know the Mac systems well.  But I know Windows very well.  I was an early 3.1
developer. From a tooling standpoint, I have a history of doing tooling.  So I was very in into the LightSpeed products
and the Borland products and how they built IDEs and really digging into those, and then through Unix and Systems and
that portfolio of technologies kind of grew underneath me. 

Things as much sometimes as they are new, things are sometimes, you know, repurposed from the past. 

The second thing though is I kept kind of a log.  Sometimes I would think technology was absolutely a barn burner.  And
it just flopped.  And so I learned that there was the business dimension.  You know, there was the adoption dimension. 
Technology just for itself isn't very good. And so that was the kind of, you know, forming base of interesting technology, 
what's the business value and how do I develop my sense for that. 

Luckily, working with customers has been great.  Trying to interpret what customers want is hard.  You know?  And they
say things and you go I got it, I got it, and maybe it's just because we're engineers we want to go off and do it, as
opposed to just listen.  Just listen and consume it and, you know, and just hold it and put it up on the wall and think
about it a while.  Because your first instinct to fix it is probably not right.  You need more data to, more collection
of information. 

So part of what I recommend to people is, you know, as you're coming up, and especially with the Internet today, it's
the amount of information, the amount of great innovation out there continues, look at things that you're interested in,
you know, whether they're in, directly, area of expertise or not. And one of my humorous ones I was working on,
mainframes, and on weekends I was, you know, trying to program postscript printers. 

And my boss' would come in and say what's this got to do with your job?  The answer is it has nothing to do with my job
but I learn something new every time. 

And you know having that and then realizing that your portfolio of skills, some which go away, some which grow and how
you see those technologies mature in the marketplace, you become very valuable.  Your skills become very valuable, 
because you know how to make investments, you know how to set expectations, critical for emerging technologies.  
And you help your, you know, your business be able to make decisions that you know will help them grow, and that's what 
we're all here for.

LANINGHAM:	Thanks for that, Rod.  I mean that's really really interesting to hear, and your point is well taken
about the need for being patient and the power of observation, because there's a lot of things happening new every day
but not all of it connects to reality much, does it? 

SMITH:	No, it doesn't.  And like I said it's very sobering, when you start to collect these and you're sure best
technologies win, and they don't come close.  And forming your judgment is the best thing you can do.

LANINGHAM:	Right.  Anything before we go, anything that you had hoped to get out or share and that I just never got
to or    I mean, I hope we can come back and talk again, because there is so much that we could chat with you about, 
and like we say, this is all unfolding and there will be other things to talk about.  Hopefully we can do that again.

SMITH:	We should love to talk about where we think web 2.0 is going and some of the things I'm hearing from customers
about more of the types of applications. I think that's one that I think your audience would like to hear.  Let's get out
of the technology some more.  What are the applications that they're looking at.  What are these mash ups, and what is 
the business value of those, and maybe the next time, if your audience is interested, you know we could go through four 
or five different mashups that we're working on as proof of concepts from the application level. That helps, I think, 
your audience understand why some of these technologies look interesting to customers. 

And so go to the applications, let's talk about them and then you can kind of say, I see such and such technology which
might be helpful here or, boy, the thing I'm working on on this one might not yield the same benefits to it.  But that
would be a fun area to talk about. 

LANINGHAM:	Excellent.  So I should talk to Valerie about where to get it on the calendar again? 

SMITH:		Yeah.

LANINGHAM:	I'll do that.

SMITH:		Okay.

LANINGHAM:	We'll give you a few weeks to recover from this one since you've got plenty of other stuff going on.

SMITH:		I appreciate that.

LANINGHAM:	Let me say, Rod Smith, thanks so much for your time.  It was great chatting with you today, and very
		educational.

SMITH:		Thank you.  And I hope your audience enjoys it.

LANINGHAM:	This has been a developerWorks interview with Rod Smith, IBM vice president of Emerging Internet Technologies. 
You can find all of our podcasts at ibm.com/developerworks/podcast. 
		
I'm Scott Laningham. Talk to you next time.

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