IBM's Steve Mills on RealTime
As we prepare for our next RealTime CrunchUp on November 20th in San Francisco, we're seeing if anything an acceleration of the phenomenon known as RealTime. Startups, cloud platform vendors, the open standards community, and virtually every software …
Context & Ripple Effects
TechCrunch's November 20th RealTime CrunchUp extends a thread the network has been pulling since its live-event notes in 2005 and the Crunchies awards launched in late 2007: real-time moved from a feature to the frame for how startups, cloud vendors, and standards bodies talk about software. FriendFeed opening real-time APIs in October 2008 was the consumer-side proof point; this event is where that agenda meets enterprise buyers.
Steve Mills appearing is the notable part. Through 2009 IBM had already been building toward this audience — acquiring data-discovery firm Exeros into business analytics in May, launching My developerWorks as a developer social network in April, and expanding switching partnerships with Juniper, Cisco and Brocade by July (a rumored Brocade resale arrangement remains unconfirmed). A top software executive fronting a startup-heavy real-time conference is IBM signaling that its analytics-and-platform story needs credibility with exactly this crowd.
First-order effects
- Mills gets a direct line to founders and cloud vendors deciding which enterprise stack to build on, while IBM gains startup-facing visibility it cannot buy through its usual sales channels.
- TechCrunch's event gains enterprise weight: an IBM principal validates the 'real-time as platform shift' framing the CrunchUp is organized around.
Second-order effects
- Rival enterprise vendors — the same cohort circling Sun during the rumored ~$7B talks earlier in 2009 — face pressure to show comparable startup and developer outreach or cede the 'real-time-ready infrastructure' label.
- Analytics and data-integration suppliers like Exeros-style targets become more strategic as real-time feeds make streaming data discovery a selling point rather than a batch-era afterthought.
Third-order effects
- If incumbents keep meeting the startup ecosystem on its own conference ground, the real-time layer becomes contested territory between enterprise platforms and consumer-web companies rather than a niche both can ignore.
- Developer-community plays like developerWorks point toward enterprise competition being fought through social networks of developers, not just hardware contracts — a structural shift in how large vendors source innovation.
The trend: Enterprise computing giants are moving onto the startup real-time stage, converting a consumer-web phenomenon into a battleground for platform mindshare.