One of the things that I like about working at IBM (specifically, ISST or Tivoli Lab Services) is their transparency. What I mean by that is much like the open source community that lives by their openness within code, development, documentation and support, IBM is very open in terms of its documentation and best practices.
When I’m surfing the net looking to learn about company X, Y or Z and their approaches towards technology, products and solutions such as Business Service Management, I always look for their user groups, documentation, best practices and other useful information that may show how they’re doing things. Do you know how successful I am? Not very! Why? I don’t know, but the general lack of transparency that other vendors has when compared to IBM does concern me.
Tivoli’s documentation, best practices and implementation guides (Redbooks), support, and user groups are pretty much wide open for the world to see. Also consider alphaWorks, developerWorks and OPAL!!
Transparent? Yes! Competitive differentiator? Yes! Like Open Source? Yes! Well, sort of. š
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can’t agree more. I refer to the type of company you’re referring to as an “open company” and it needs not to be an open source company. Transparency is vital and IBM is definitely ahead of the pack on this. Having worked for a vendor that asked for an NDA to give a sales presentation! before, I can appreciate the difference truly. Openness rocks, hats off to IBM. Just as a note in the networking world, I find Cisco is similar having all the docs available etc.
Again I agree. It seemed to start with IBMs buy in to Linux and the considerable boost that gave to the open source community. IBM give regular presentations at the British Computer Society and always come across as out of the box people. Having dealt with IBMs competitors it’s always refreshing to come back to IBM.
Rgds Rob.