IBM's Janet Perna: Making Sense of Data Overload

On a somber day when IBM revealed a corporate restructuring that involves 10,000 to 13,000 layoffs, one IBM executive ironically had the pleasant task of addressing approximately 1,000 of the company's newest employees. IBM general manager Janet Perna recently visited Westboro, Mass.-based Ascential Software, which IBM purchased for $1.1 billion in March. Perna, who heads IBM's now 5,000-employee Information Management Group, was there to greet the new staffers and outline her information-management strategy going forward, which is heavy on data federation and the ability to access, in context, information housed in different formats in any array of places within a corporation's vast IT network. Perna sat down with VARBusiness editor Carolyn A. April to talk about her goals and how IBM business partners fit into the mix.

VARBusiness: Where do partners fit into the information-management business?

Perna: Partners are important to the overall business, every aspect of it. Seventy percent of [these] deals are influenced by partners. I want to continue to grow the core relational DB2 base, and then come up the value chain to provide higher-level value capabilities...I want to make it easier for partners to build applications that leverage all of the information that customers have...The more that we can do in the middleware layer, to abstract and simplify it, the faster partners can move to build their solutions. And we want them to build on IBM's infrastructure.

VB: Where do you see the biggest business opportunities?

Perna: [In terms of revenue], the largest opportunity continues to be relational databases, and that's in the industry in general...Enterprise content management is the next biggest slice; what's driving that is cost savings, because it is cheaper to store information in electronic form, and it helps operating efficiency because you can apply workflow technologies. That market is growing in the double digits. Then there's information integration. It is the smallest piece now in terms of [revenue] opportunity, but it is the fastest-growing piece of the market--higher double digits than content management.

VB: You have made many acquisitions during the past few years to shore up your portfolio. Are you still looking to expand?

Perna: We are always looking when it comes to build vs. buy. Where we have decided to acquire technology, it has been to get to market faster. In terms of other investments, we are looking around master data management, which lets you provide a unified view of business information. Other areas we are looking to expand in are around customer hubs, and we are investing in customer data models and base technology to create such hubs of information.

VB: Talk about the impact regulatory-compliance mandates like Sarbanes-Oxley are having on IBM's sales.

Perna: It has had a very positive impact in terms of our business. But the CEOs who have to comply, obviously, aren't happy. We think there are two approaches to compliance solutions. One is that you install some niche product that allows you to comply, but does nothing else. Our approach is [different]. We have a platform and framework for compliance that allows you to not only comply, but also to use it for other things. Think of it as a unified platform able to support various regulatory and other initiatives. *