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Focusing on delivering emerging technologies to early adopters.
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Innovation has always been central to IBM's strategy and part of the daily life of many at IBM. A crucial (and successful) part of continuing that legacy of innovation is turning conceptual and experimental findings from research into commercial opportunities.
A key part of that innovation engine is alphaWorks, an organization within the IBM Software Group that focuses on delivering emerging technologies to early adopters. alphaWorks was initially started in Hawthorne, New York in 1996 as an online lab initiative and its core mission is to accelerate the transfer of so-called disruptive technologies out of IBM Research labs and into the market.
alphaWorks promotes software innovation by allowing the technical community to preview some of IBM's latest research on its Web site. Visitors have the opportunity to download emerging technologies and to validate their usefulness. What started out as a barebones Web site with few projects quickly found its niche, with a growing audience interested in exploring these early releases.
Thus, many of IBM's strategic software initiatives since the mid-nineties took shape on alphaWorks. Java, XML, Web services and Eclipse have all had some significant, enabling technologies that were developed in labs and then made available through alphaworks. The positive feedback from this growing community helped to promote the adoption of these technologies and establish standards. Many technologies on alphaWorks have had a greater impact in the technical community as some of them were released as open source projects. For example, IBM's first open source license for a technology called Jikes was posted on the alphaWorks site on December 1998. Due to its popularity and instant community, it was open sourced the following year.
alphaWorks is now recognized as a place where technology can be showcased, validated and commercialized. It holds the largest public repository of emerging technologies, with over 800 projects or "technologies". Over 550 of which have been published to www.ibm.com/alphaworks for an early adopter developer and technical community to download and evaluate. To date, that has meant over three million downloads served to more than one million individual developers.
After nearly a decade of shepherding technologies, the alphaWorks team has honed a business model and best practices to select, surface and validate emerging technologies.
1. Attracting new technologies: The first step in launching innovative technology is finding a pool of research and development technologies that could benefit from early exposure to a technical community. Traditionally, this has been technology that is forward-looking and may not have a natural fit within an existing product family or solution offerings.
Autonomic computing is an example of an idea that was featured on alphaWorks several years ago, helping to introduce developers to software that could help them work better and faster and with less human intervention. Autonomic computing describes a set of technologies and tools that enable applications, systems, and entire networks to become more self-managing. This idea of autonomic technologies is more pervasive today, with the help of software tools from alphaWorks, which helped to not only explain this somewhat abstract and complicated concept, but also helped to illustrate through practical application how the technology could help in a development environment and in business.
2. Developing the business case: The alphaWorks team receives over a hundred submissions a year. The primary criterion is that the technology must be emerging. Technologies need to explore new strategic directions for IBM or target early-entry marketplaces, introduce upcoming industry standards and/or specifications and should be appealing to early adopters. If a submission doesn't fit the bill, it simply won't make the cut. For this reason, every year alphaWorks rejects numerous technologies, even through they may be viable tools in other scenarios.
3. Surfacing emerging technologies: Technologies that are selected to be showcased on alphaWorks surface on various parts of the Web site. Strategic marketing also helps to generate awareness about new releases. Often the team is able to anticipate demand for a technology, especially when there are communities that have been awaiting the release. For example, a technology called Integrated Development Environment for Laszlo, a preview of an Eclipse-based development environment for creating Laszlo applications using the LZX declarative mark-up language, was an instant success. In less than a year, the technology has had over 20,000 downloads, and based on the community interest, this technology has had numerous enhancements and is being considered as a candidate for the open source community.
4. Matching technologies with opportunities: Technologies that debut on alphaWorks can have several paths to success. This includes becoming a new product at a future date or being incorporated into familiar products. Some technologies receive a lot of interest for commercial licenses, meaning that those who have downloaded the tools would like to continue using them beyond the free evaluation period. Another avenue for technologies is to become open sourced based on community feedback. Of course, some technologies just don't evolve, sometimes because of lack of public interest.
5. Gauging real-time feedback: Ultimately, it is the community of developers, architects, administrators, consultants, business people and others who really determine the future of early release technology. Beyond making a project visible, IBM seeks to ascertain what developers think of the technology. Is it useful? Does it solve a business problem? Is it something that should be offered as a product with support? Is it a concept that is too far ahead of its time?
The answers are sometimes a surprise, for instance, when some high-profile technologies aren't downloaded that often, or others that started off as smaller efforts take on a life of their own. In the case of NotesBuddy, a unified notification and messaging tool for e-mail and instant messaging, the technology not only proved to be popular when it was launched in late 1999, five years later the technology is still one of the most downloaded projects.
Whether it is early adopters gaining access to cutting-edge technology from IBM's labs, or innovators sharing an interest in this unique business model, clients often provide feedback-and it is overwhelmingly positive. Over the years, alphaWorks has proven that the key driver to success is fostering innovation - in an innovative way.