Imagine being able to spin the
clock forward to peek into the
world of the future – to wonder at
the advances of society, business
and technology five to ten years
from now.
That’s exactly what IBM Research has strived to
do since 1982 with the Global Technology
Outlook (GTO). IBM Research and its global
community of some of the world’s top scientists
consider the cultural and business applications
in which technologies will be used – and the
impact they will have on IBM and the world.
The GTO provides a comprehensive analysis of
that vision. In past years the GTO has
predicted such trends as autonomic and cloud
computing, the rise of nanotechnology, and the
ability to create smarter cities and smarter
systems through the application of analytics.
An intensive year of work goes into each GTO
– generating the ideas, gathering data, debating
the issues with colleagues and peers, and then
presenting a final report to IBM Chairman and
CEO Samuel Palmisano. Throughout the
process, the analysis of the GTO topics focuses
on both the technology at hand and the
business and societal implications of each trend
being analyzed.
Inside IBM, the GTO is used to define areas of
focus and investment. Externally, it is shared
broadly with a range of IT influencers -
including clients, academics, and partners -
through education and client briefings.
This outlook is not designed to singularly
benefit IBM. In fact, some of the trends
explored may be well beyond IBM’s portfolio of
offerings. And that’s what makes the GTO
Introduction
such a success each year – providing clients and
partners with an impartial take of the world and
the evolution of IT across business, economic
and natural systems.
This year’s GTO is no different.
When IBM set its sights on helping to create a
smarter planet two years ago, we predicted the
evolution of an increasingly instrumented,
intelligent and interconnected world. Since
that time, the application of technology has
helped create real-world monitoring and data
prediction for water systems, cities and
municipalities, utilities and power grids,
financial and logistics providers, and traffic and
transportation entities.
The next phase of smarter planet looks to build
upon that progress and momentum. How can
these systems be optimized, adapted and reused
to create increasingly intelligent modeling and
data-based prediction? Can technology help
transform healthcare to provide better patient
outcomes while reducing costs? Will advances
in software help business leap past the
performance limitations of hardware? Can new
computing models like cloud and hybrid
computing help manage legacy hardware,
processes and applications? What can be
learned by looking across multiple systems and
platforms that can help optimize workloads?
The 2010 Global Technology Outlook that
follows takes a far-reaching view into these
challenges at a global level and offers insights
into the future. This report is designed for
your organization to benefit from them as
much as we have here at IBM.
The increasing complexity of
healthcare is a major contributor to
rising costs. At the same time,
healthcare is becoming an IT-based
industry, based on a continuum of
machine generated digital
information.
Page 1
Today, emerging early diagnostics can lead to
earlier intervention, resulting in improved
outcomes and lower costs at the front end. But
what emerges at the back end are reams and
reams of data that, when added to the data
already out there, potentially complicates
decision making at the point of care.
To improve healthcare we must be able to make
data more usable by synthesizing evidence from
it, making the data more readily available at the
point of need.
Improvements in the delivery of healthcare
increasingly will rely on having usable evidence
readily available at the point of care. Systems
that are designed to provide clinical decision
intelligence and evidence-based assistance can
improve the ability of providers to anticipate
need and tailor delivery.
Evidence generation
The process of transforming data into evidence
is called the generation phase. It is in this phase
that comparative effectiveness and practice-
based evidence studies, using the best available
evidence gained from the scientific method, are
used to make medical decisions.
To accomplish this, cloud computing and data
trust infrastructures are used for data collection,
aggregation, integration, information
management and curation. The resulting
federated data structures then are available for
evidence generation using smart analytics tools.
The ensuing evidence whether in evidence
registries or other forms then can be easily
synthesized, extracted, disseminated and
consumed by patients, providers, regulators,
researchers, and wellness management services.
 Service quality
Through business process transformation and
increasing the use of IT to generate and process
data and to generate data-based evidence —
care providers and related entities can improve
workflow efficiency, increase safety and reduce
errors. This will enable new collaborations
among the various entities in the healthcare
ecosystem, such as providers, insurers, payers,
patients, pharmacies and regulators. It also will
enable new delivery models, such as patient-
centered collaborative care.

Novel incentives
Insurers and services firms may offer financial
incentives to healthcare providers and
practitioners to adopt evidence-based systems,
allowing them to reduce costs while improving
patient care.

Evidence-informed, outcome-based payment

modeling and contract optimization services
will help create and sustain a virtuous cycle
where outcome-based payment incentives lead
to improved outcomes and demand for
evidence at the point of need. This drives large
scale evidence generation and comparative
effectiveness which in turn enables the creation
and continued evolution of an evidence-centric
healthcare ecosystem.

Conclusion
As healthcare is evolving to become an
increasingly IT-based industry, evidence rapidly
is becoming its currency. It accelerates the
transport and availability of data; enables new
modeling capabilities, analysis and
consumption; and does so while simplifying a
complex industry.

Page 2
The vision of a smarter planet –
one that is highly instrumented,
interconnected and intelligent – is
one that already is in motion.
Projects underway in smarter city
programs in locations as diverse as
the Isle of Malta; Dublin, Ireland;
and Dubuque, Iowa, are laying the
groundwork.
Page 3
IBM CEO Sam Palmisano challenged IBMers
to create 300 smarter solutions in partnership
with clients in 2009. More than 1,200 examples
were brought forward in every major industry,
both in the developed and developing world.
As a result, hundreds of projects are underway
with clients and partners ranging in size from
local fire and police departments to country-
level governments. Transportation systems,
financial systems, and energy and transmission
systems are being monitored; environmental
systems including tides and currents being
measured; and millions of transactions are being
captured and analyzed using technology and
solutions designed to help them be better
understood, managed and made smarter.
As these systems become more pervasive, we
will have unprecedented real-time visibility into
power grids, traffic and transportation systems,
water management, oil & gas supplies, and
financial services. And at some point, we will
need them to share their information more
effectively and ‘talk’ to each other as part of a
larger framework.
Modeling the smarter planet
A smarter planet solution is a closed-loop
‘system of systems’. The starting point of such a
solution is always the real world itself – whether
it is a smarter grid, building, supply chain or
water system. The instrumentation integrated
into these systems provides the mechanism to
capture real world observations through digital
models. Since the real worlds are
interconnected and interdependent, the
modeled worlds will be too.
Connecting these systems will require digital
representations to help assess the complexity,
maneuver through environmental variables and
achieve more predictive outcomes.
These models will help assimilate and stitch
together the captured data, helping to
interpolate or extrapolate into areas where data
is not yet available. This will help generate a
predictive analysis to reach the most plausible
theory to explain the available information.
Assistive technologies and increasingly
intelligent instrumentation and modeling then
can be applied to real world systems.
As the components for analyzing these systems
become more standardized, data from other
types of models - business and enterprise
systems, physical IT networks, social
networking, industry frameworks, behavior
models - can then be captured and shared
across platforms from varying vantage points.
It is through orchestrating these models that we
will be able to capture the digital
representations of how the business, human,
and physical worlds interact and to predict,
manage, and provide continuous progress in a
smarter planet.
Page 4
Conclusion
Hundreds of projects designed to make a
variety of systems more instrumented,
integrated and intelligent already are underway
globally. Systems as varied as utilities, energy
and transmission grids, waterways and financial
transactions are being measured and monitored
to help make them smarter.
A platform for enabling and facilitating
synthesis and orchestration across these
environments and multi-modal information
systems is potentially the most promising
anchor point for creating repeatable smarter
planet solutions.
There also are broad opportunities as a result of
the exploration of broader coverage of
interconnected world models to unlock insights
and produce predicted business outcomes.
In the near future, three software
trends spanning the entire software
stack will significantly impact
enterprises and their IT support.
First, at the top layer, or business layer, upper
middleware will give executives increased
visibility and control over how their business
operates.
Next, at the platform layer, new control
technologies will enable clients to dynamically
determine which elements of their IT stay in-
house and which elements are “outsourced” to
a cloud computing provider.
Finally, the development of a new
programming language can help software
developers and consumers more easily access
parallel computing abilities through multi-core
and hybrid architectures.
Page 5
Upper middleware
Today’s complex application portfolios,
including legacy, custom and packaged
applications, support important operational
functions but limit the ability to innovate,
differentiate and compete. The applications’
fixed business processes, rules and information
models frequently make it expensive and time-
consuming to alter operations to reflect the
changing — often dynamic — needs of
businesses. As a result, enterprises operate on
application logic as opposed to business needs,
making it increasingly difficult to shed obsolete
applications and innovate to meet those needs.
However, a confluence of emerging
technologies — including improved modeling,
analytics, rules engines, discovery mechanisms
and monitoring tools — is making it possible to
return more control of business operations to
business executives.
Upper middleware offers a new perspective on
business operations and uses new approaches to
business-level models to describe, in business
terms, how a business needs to operate. This
enables business users to define and manage
end-to-end processes and optimize business
outcomes. It also enables business users to think
holistically about the processes, information,
business rules and analytics in a business
context. Then, discovery mechanisms helps
business users understand how to leverage their
current application environment and other IT
investments to innovate operationally.
Client controlled cloud
Cloud computing has the potential to become
the dominant means for delivery of computing
infrastructure and applications on the Internet.
As cloud takes hold, the control components of
software that are used to create, configure and
adjust the nature of applications will be
separating out from the cloud data functions
and moving to the edge of the enterprise.
A significant result of cloud computing is the
rapidity and ease of creating new computing
functions and services in the network.
However, developing new software applications
may be of limited use to established businesses
that have a significant amount of existing data
sources and applications.
New value is more commonly derived by
combining the existing data and applications
with new types of processing functions. This
combination process creates a network of
applications and data services, jointly referred
to as computing services. The advent of cloud
computing can help enterprises derive business
value by keeping some critical IT elements in-
house and outsourcing other elements into the
cloud.
The challenge, however, is maintaining control
of policies and guidelines that cloud computing
outsourcing entails.
Although the separated control functions can
take many different forms, one possible
manifestation could be that these functions
emerge in the form on an on-premises
appliance system or software layer. The on-
premises system will result in the creation of
what we are calling a Client Controlled Cloud
(C3). In the C3 paradigm, computing services
are created and composed from a variety of
cloud providers and existing services in the
enterprise to create solutions for the enterprise.
However, the control and management of such
solutions remains strongly within the
administrative domain of the enterprise client.
Page 6
Multicore programming model
Due to power issues, hardware alone no longer
can provide the single-thread performance
increases that the industry has seen over the
past few decades. Instead, performance
increases will come from parallelism, either
homogeneous (via multicore processing) or
heterogeneous (via hybrid systems). In addition
to significantly increasing applications that
demand more performance, this shift may also
affect the productivity of software development.
In the past, parallelism was optional and
attracted expert programmers, but from now
on, all applications that require a certain level
of performance will need to exploit parallelism.
Unfortunately, the number of skilled
programmers that can thrive with existing
parallel programming models is not growing,
while new application domains are leading
towards an increasing number of non-expert
programmers writing software programs.
Although many companies are exploring new
programming models for the multicore era,
most efforts are C/C++ derivatives, which will
narrow the set of programmers who can safely
exploit parallelism, and in the process losing the
productivity gains that have been realized with
Java.
In contrast, IBM is developing X10, an
evolution of the Java programming language for
concurrency and heterogeneity, leveraging
more than five years of research funded by the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA). IBM is investing significantly in
developing the ecosystem around X10 with
significant collaborations with two dozen
universities.
 X10 allows programmers to expose fine-grained
concurrency in their applications, which should
be a good match for the multicore era. It also
enables programmers to naturally describe
heterogeneous computation at the language
level without the tedious message-passing
constructs. X10 has been used to demonstrate a
6x productivity improvement over the C
message passing interface.

Conclusion
Software will play an increasingly important
role in helping to achieve new computing
performance standards and maximizing the
potential of distributed or workload optimized
computing systems.

Upper middleware will help provide a unified

dashboard view to non-technical users across
layers, provide a holistic business view that will
enable better decision making and improve the
ability to shed legacy applications for more
transformative ones. Enhanced discovery tools
will help this operational innovation model
evolve.

As cloud computing becomes more pervasive

and easier to implement, automatic
provisioning at the platform layer will simplify
decision making on which functions and
applications can be outsourced or move to the
edge of the enterprise.

By adopting the X10 programming language,

software developers will contribute to the future
of software-based computing acceleration across
increasingly interoperable, scalable, parallel
computing systems.

Page 7
The average corporation spends
around 70 percent of its IT budget
to keep existing operations going,
with a significant portion allocated
to maintain and improve their
legacy equipment.
Page 8
Many more are spending close to 85 percent of
their IT budget for ongoing operations, leaving
only 15 percent available for innovation. This
level of constraint leaves these companies at a
high risk to completely lose their IT-driven
business agility.
Highly efficient companies, on the other hand,
spend only 60 percent of their IT budget for
ongoing operations, leaving 40 percent for new
and innovative initiatives. Such companies have
a competitive edge based on continued high
business agility and the ability to constantly
differentiate.
Legacy is by no means limited to ‘old
hardware.’ It actually is found across the entire
IT value stack. As soon as a business model,
process, software, data format or infrastructure
is deployed, it is considered to be legacy. It even
includes soft factors like 'know-how' legacy.
And as with all value stacks, handling it in an
integrated way results in the highest value.
New and emerging technologies and new
business realities are changing the game for
legacy efficiency improvements across the
legacy value stack. These include:
The integrated legacy control loop
To help manage and actively handle these
legacy classes in a repeatable pattern, a legacy
control loop should be implemented. This
control loop would feature three defined
positions:
Last but not least, the ‘Operate’ aspect of the
legacy control loop ensures continued
operation, and includes actions to reduce future
legacy issues. As part of this, a legacy council
would, for example, review all IT procurements
in order to ensure that new acquisitions are
‘legacy proven’.

Each position in the loop would feature a
variety of actions supported by corresponding
tool sets and value prediction tools.
Conclusion
In order to maintain high business agility and
the ability to differentiate, constant and
repeated legacy efficiency improvement with
double digit savings per year in ongoing IT
operations is a must.

There are two ways to apply the legacy control To achieve this, two key imperatives have to be
loop. The legacy control cycle can be applied followed. First, legacy efficiency improvements
selectively to one legacy class, even to one have to be applied in an integrated fashion
single legacy item. But when applied in the across the legacy value stack layers and not just
form of an integrated legacy service offering to one layer at a time. Second, a structured
across several classes, it provides significantly approach needs to be leveraged to guarantee
higher value. repeated savings, which are achieved by
repeatedly applying the legacy control loop
For the ‘Identify’ position of the control loop, a with the three basic steps of identify - improve
legacy dashboard & workbench can be used to – operate.
map applications, data and infrastructure to a
business process – and vice versa. This would
help provide valuable insight into the complex
relationships between infrastructure, data &
applications and the related business processes.
It also could establish a legacy inventory to help
facilitate and maintain continued optimization.

The ‘Improve’ position of the legacy control

loop includes all actions suitable to positively
changing the legacy system. While that part of
the legacy considered to be a burden is reduced,
the heritage of the legacy is fostered and better
leveraged. A comprehensive tool suite would
help leverage insights gained from the legacy
dashboard.

Page 9
The ongoing, exponential increase
in wireless traffic globally is driving
the need for more efficient use of
both radio spectrum and wireless
infrastructure capacity.
Page 10
Spectrum constraints are due to both the
limitations of current radio-frequency
allocation and the limitations of radio
interference. The wireless infrastructure
capacity is constrained by network bandwidth
limitations, upgrade costs and logistics, and the
legacy of existing installations.
Both sets of constraints are becoming
bottlenecks. Addressing them offers significant
opportunities for holistic, system-wide
optimizations that can create new efficiencies
and new business opportunities.
From an application perspective, there are three
major areas driving significant growth of
wireless traffic:

The existing wireless infrastructure
Current wireless network architecture has three
regions: the radio access network (RAN), the
backhaul to the radio network controller (via
microwave or fiber), and the core network.
required to reduce latency for media
applications and to enable advanced services to
overcome performance variability in the
wireless network.
New approaches for the future
To address these constraints and challenges,
new technologies are emerging for the future
wireless infrastructure.

Each of these three architectural regions poses

challenges:

The RAN is limited by the reusable spectrum

for wireless mobile communication. For
instance, the data-intensive applications
popularized by devices such as the Apple
iPhoneTM are challenging the cellular wireless
network’s ability to effectively support user hot
spots. The wireless industry is trying to solve
these issues by making wireless cells smaller in
hot spots and using more complex signal
processing to improve spectral efficiency. The
smaller cells will drive the need to manage
radically distributed systems, and the signal-
processing intensive solutions drive the need for
new and more powerful systems and system
architectures.

Backhaul capacity is limited primarily due to the

proliferation of cells to address spectrum re-use.
Current industry approaches to address the
growth of aggregate traffic involve upgrades of
microwave backhaul or installation of fiber
backhaul, both of which require substantial
capital investments. It is important to reduce
the growth of traffic over backhaul links using
approaches such as content caching and traffic
shaping at the wireless edge.

Core networks involve multiple tiers, typically

with large latency for media applications. A
flatter and more intelligent core network is
Page 11
 Conclusion
In the future, given the huge anticipated growth
in wireless bandwidth requirements, and the
backdrop of both spectrum and infrastructure
constraints, there will be a huge opportunity for
new systems and solutions to enable future edge
of wireless network services.

A key dimension of this opportunity will be the

ability to enable & optimize service quality,
mobility, and cost using computational IT
platforms, tools, practices and approaches. This
profound shift represents a new paradigm of
wireless and IT infrastructure convergence.

Page 12
Over the next several years, there
will be a significant transformation
of IT delivery, with increasing
focus on manageability, reduction
in operating costs, and improving
time-to-value for delivering value
from IT to line of business owners
and customers.
This will include a selective adoption of
“private Clouds” and cloud services and a re-
thinking of the traditional layer-by-layer
approach of building and managing IT systems,
with their multiple layers of applications,
middleware, infrastructure software, servers,
networks, and storage.
In the traditional approach, integration of the
overall “system” happens only in the customer
data center, resulting in significant integration
cost, elongated deployment time, and legacy
management complexity. The resulting
environment is difficult to adapt to changes in
demand and usage.
Page 13
IT suppliers, including IBM, will address these
problems by introducing Workload Optimized
Systems (WOS) that are pre-integrated and
optimized for important application domains,
such as data analytics, business applications,
web/collaboration, compliance and archiving.
These WOS will deliver transformational
improvements in client value by integrating and
optimizing the complete system at all layers.
For example, a WOS for data analytics could
transform user interaction with large data
warehouses by reducing the variance in the time
to satisfy a user query to the data warehouse.
Workload optimized continuum
The client value provided by WOS includes
improvements in functionality, reliability,
availability, time to deployment (which is also
time-to-value), as well as reductions in
operating costs through better manageability
and improved energy efficiency.
In current industry practice, we see increasing
functionality and client value with
improvements in individual components over
time. For instance, processing based on
transistor density has been increasing with
Moore’s Law (2X every two years). However,
the resulting boost in performance increasingly
is in the form of more parallelism (more cores,
more threads per core). Delivering application
level increases in performance will require
optimization of the software stack to exploit this
parallelism. If such changes are not made,
progress will not keep pace.
In this GTO topic, a WOS continuum is
defined that demonstrates an increase in client
value – at a rate that is much higher than
current industry practice. The following
describes three levels in the WOS continuum:
integration, customized integration and
hardware/software co-optimization:
Infrastructure and technology
In addition to looking at some WOS examples,
one also must investigate the underlying system
infrastructure. In looking at many important
Page 14
classes of workload optimized systems, IBM
researchers have discovered that there are
common patterns found in them. As this new
paradigm of systems establishes itself, it is
anticipated that only a few platforms -
numbering in the single digits – will emerge to
support workload optimized systems.
A platform for WOS will comprise common
components like:
These systems will require system-wide co-
optimization of hardware and software, and will
exhibit a tight connection between software,
compute elements, extended memory and
storage elements, and high-speed network. As
new technologies emerge in these areas, WOS
can exploit the new co-optimization
opportunities across the HW/SW stack.
Conclusion
Increasing client value will be delivered through
different levels of integration moving through
the continuum of WOS to deliver high levels of
co-design and co-optimization across the
hardware and software stack. Successive
refinement and expansion of customer value
through a multi-year roadmap will be necessary
to overcome any perception that a WOS is a
one-of-a-kind hardware solution for each
application and that many application/workload
classes can be supported by a small set of
workload optimized platforms.
 International Business Machines Corporation
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