IBM CIO: 'We Are Going Through A Transformation'

International Business Machines Corp. IBM was once known as the foremost place for technological innovation. However, the last few years saw many tech startups becoming tech giants in their own right, and IBM seems to have lost that image.

IBM Chief Innovation Officer, Bernard Meyerson, was interviewed by Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on the innovations taking place at the company.

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Is IBM Still An Innovation Company?

“If you take a look at the company, we have reinvented ourselves and changed the world numerous times and to point a fact, just like anything else you go through a transition,” Meyerson said.

“If you think back to the evolution of our mainframe Systems/360, those systems were bet the company evolution [sic.], we literally bet the company. Our investment was such that if it worked, we either are going to be heroes and if it didn’t work, we were going to be gone and it worked and it changed the world.”

The Company's Estimations Vs. Reality

He continued, “Of course originally we thought we’ll only need 10 computers. We were a little off on that number. You don’t get everything right, but the secret to life is 'close' is actually somehow good enough as long as you get enough of them right.”

“The fact is, we are going through a transformation now, but I think the strategy is sound and in fact like every transformation, there’s going to be ups and downs to it.”

What’s IBM’s Strategy?

“If you look at what we have done, we have defined a terminology we call CAMSS, which is basically cloud, which is clearly becoming a dominant force in the market,” Meyerson replied.

“You look at analytics that we made early and we made big and that’s what we’ve been quite successful [at]. Then you look at basically social and security. These are the two things; they drive, however, massive amounts of associative things like storage.”