The morning's keynote is Gail Whipple, VP of Digital Media for IBM Global Services speaking on Digital Media: Cool to Core. Digital media is unstructured content not stored in traditional databases. Gail see three key trends:
- Rapid increase in content moving from analog to digital as are devices
- Increased broadband penetration
- Lowering of price points, especially in storage (1 minute of digital video is 375MB).
By 2005 global digital media spend is $33 billion without including the devices for input and output.
On demand is the logical extension of today's business processes growing more mature over time. Demands a shift in how companies think about allocation resources. Four critical components to on demand environment
- Integrated - Devices, people, etc.
- Virtualized - grid computing providing utility computing
- Open - open standards, open source,
- Autonomic - self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing, self-protecting
Some examples from IBM Global Services clients:
The National Geographic Society has over 10,000 available images with 3000 images added each year. NGS now has a searchable catalog with 24/7 availability including online licensing and payment. NGS photo sales revenue tripled with reduced handling costs. Grew revenue without a staff increase
Coca-Cola built a system for the preservation and retrieval of 100 years of value brand assets. They built a comprehensive library available to 30,000 images which is used in marketing and orientation. The project saves money by retrieving existing images rather than recreating them.
Digital media application on homedepot.com for customers to view kitchen layouts. Number one destination for homedepot.com customers and customers spend 22 minutes at the site. Customers can reconfigure, visualize, and when finished order the supplies online or bring the print-out into their local store for purchase.
MacDonalds implementing a dynamic digital merchandising system allowing individual stores manage their own messaging via digital kiosks, flat panel displays, and so on. Sales in stores that implement it are up 33%. Increase in sales can be directly tied to featured products on panels.
IBM has been awarded 22,000 patents over the last 10 years and this portfolio has resulted in $10B additional revenue to IBM's bottom line. This experience drives IBM's approach to digital rights management. I'm not sure I caught the entire point of this, but it was clear that she was trying to point to some middle ground that respects IP without restricting it. She offered no information about how this might actually be done.
