In the second part of this exclusive interview, IBM Senior Vice President Steve Mills tells Tech Update Editorial Director David Berlind what it's like to partner with both Microsoft and Sun, what it will take for Microsoft to play a bigger role in the world's transactions, and why WebSphere and DB2 will serve as the future underpinnings of Lotus Notes.
Tech Update: The word standard used to mean that some officially recognized standards-setting body ratified it. I get the sense that that's no longer true. What is a standard today?
Mills: Well, take it from the customer view. The customer is seeking things that are common, well-understood, highly accessible, repeatable, and ubiquitous. They don't really care if it has an imprimatur on it; it's valuable through use. So, traditional notions of standards bodies have given way to a more fluid approach. Classic standards bodies in existence will continue to be in existence, but there are also de facto standards bodies that are created within industries today.
today.
Industrial chemicals [companies] and financial institutions are coming together to create their own XML standards that are specific to their industry and the way they want to exchange information. The vendors are not engaged in those meetings because the vendors are not making the decisions as to how banks are going to define their transactional structures. The banks are deciding what that's going to be and they'll instantiate those things in XML. They'll in effect declare a Web service for those interactions [that] will then have to be adopted by the vendors who want to participate in those opportunities.
So we're democratizing to an ever greater degree these standardization processes in the industry today. It's very powerful in terms of accelerating standards in general.
Tech Update: You say common, well-understood, repeatable. What's the ultimate benefit to the customer?
Mills: Integration.
Tech Update: What about the notion of complying with standards, competing on implementation? I thought that one benefit was that companies can actually make substitutions based on those standards as another way of lowering their costs.
Mills: Absolutely. It's absolutely a priority for customers to make easy substitutions and it's a priority for us. As a heterogeneous supplier of hardware, software, and services, it benefits our business. The emergence of standards reduces the time and energy it requires to deploy information technology and makes it possible to do more in a given year than you can do today. The industry is labor-limited today.
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