Car parts firm drives change

Two news items have caught my attention. IBM has taken a well-prepared step forward in defining its Cloud offers and French auto-parts manufacturer Valeo has done a deal with Google.

IBM has been applying the technological capabilities that underwrite one key aspect of the cloud to its own operations. It reports that, through creation of its own internal clouds, it has consolidated 155 datacentres to five, and 16,000 applications to 4500, delivering $1.5bn (£930m) in annual savings.

This is the power of virtualisation at work. In its briefing to analysts, IBM included the widely recognised statistic that, in the corporate world's current distributed computing environments, up to 85 per cent of computing capacity sits idle at any one time.

So let us use a fresh shorthand for these technological capabilities so applied - services manufacturing. It is intended to convey the production realities pioneered by Google and Amazon.com in the consumer services space - software-enabled business processes manufactured in a highly automated fashion to be delivered as services over the web. The manufacturing techniques developed in business-to-consumer markets are overdue a determined application in the endlessly conservative business-to-business markets.

In addition to its own transformation through services manufacture, IBM has been working with a range of customers, and also with green-field academic institutions in the Middle East and the Far East that have presented the opportunity to build from scratch. The outcome is a portfolio that ranges from B2B services delivered from the IBM cloud to business services to rework in-house corporate infrastructural capabilities into private clouds. The leitmotifs are ‘Smart Business' and ‘Service Management Systems'.

IBM is going for the transformational - the massive backlog of 15 per cent efficient corporate infrastructural stuff that needs to be brought into the 21st century. Which is what makes the Valeo announcement even more interesting.

Valeo ranks among the world's top automotive component suppliers, with 122 plants, 61 R&D centres and 10 distribution platforms. It employs around 49,000 people in 27 countries and has, I guess, an experienced in-house IT team.

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