The document discusses the importance of cloud technology as a growth engine for businesses, emphasizing the need for rapid adaptation to customer demands and the shift toward service-based models. It highlights the benefits of adopting a hybrid cloud approach, which allows organizations to dynamically combine resources for improved efficiency and innovation. Furthermore, it outlines strategies for business leaders, developers, and IT managers to leverage cloud solutions to enhance collaboration, speed up development, and better respond to market changes.

1. Cloud is the growth engine for business.
Informed and inspired by 20,000 Smarter Planet engagements,
here’s what we know and believe about cloud.
N O
1 . 2 I N A S E R I E S
Building a smarter enterprise: The essential building blocks
What’s changing in the world today?
The speed of business has
accelerated, driving the need
for rapid business model
changes.
Clients have placed new demands on
business. They require any time, anywhere
access to services. They want a personal-
ized experience fueled by analytics. They
want to engage with the business with
mobile and social.
Businesses are becoming
increasingly service-based
across core business process-
es to stay competitive.
Businesses are turning to cloud-enabled
business services to reinvent core busi-
ness processes and drive innovation and
efficiency. They are choosing a hybrid of
options to take advantage of flexibility,
interoperability, and the best of on- and
off-premise environments.
The lines are blurring between
business leaders, developers
and IT management.
Historically, these three areas have operat-
ed somewhat independently of each other
and, in some cases, even operated in
conflict. Today we’re beginning to see the
lines blurring – partially out of business
necessity and partially because of ad-
vancements in technology.
Cloud

2. Why act now?
Speed
Act with Speed. Businesses need to
adapt more readily to the needs and wants
of customers. To move faster, developers
must adopt to a DevOps model of rapidly
creating new applications by assembling
capabilities from a marketplace of applica-
tion, solutions and APIs. This requires an
IT infrastructure that provides flexible
and scalable computing power, storage,
and memory.
Economics
Build a More Efficient Organization.
A service-based organization is more
effective because it can more quickly and
cost effectively deploy new services to
serve employees, customers and suppli-
ers. Developers can drive a higher level
of product and service delivery by quickly
assembling and deploying new ser-
vice-based applications ahead of
competition and IT can drive higher
utilization of the IT infrastructure.
Empowerment
Empower Leaders to Succeed.
Business leaders can drive innovation
into a business that is able to quickly
adapt and respond to customer demand.
Developers will spend less time coding
and more time focusing on the end user
experience. IT managers are able to
re-orient their organization, becoming a
service provider for the business with
increased capacity to innovate.
So, what should you do? How do you act strategically?
Embrace composability
in your business
A “composable” business takes a
building block approach. It views
business processes, applications, data,
and infrastructure as a set of component
parts. As your business requirements
change, you can then quickly assess the
components you have available, and those
you need to acquire from a vendor, and
assemble the pieces together for your
required solution.
Leverage a dynamic
hybrid cloud
The path to a composable business is
dynamic cloud: the ability to dynamically
deploy, consume, interconnect and
orchestrate all types of clouds and IT in
order to speed innovation and adapt to
changing business conditions. The ability
to mix and match best in class capabilities
dynamically from any source means you
get the flexibility and advantages of a
hybrid environment where services,
applications, workloads can move to
the ideal place to meet changing
business demands.
Change the way
people work
Cloud is changing the way work
gets done across roles within an
organization, providing:
• Business leaders choice of
market leading services
• Developers a robust platform for
service composition
• IT Managers a self-optimizing
hybrid environment.

3. How can IBM Help?
IBM can help you
Think It
Strategize how to use cloud
to drive revenue growth
and efficiencies
Build It
Build and run your private or
dynamic hybrid cloud
Tap Into It
Utilize cloud services deliv-
ered from IBM Cloud
Business Leaders
• Accelerate business innovation
across the entire C-suite
• Seamlessly integrate cloud and
existing business solutions
• Collaborate across business and
IT for better outcomes
Develop a strategy to drive
competitive advantage through
business services:
• Identify new business models
• Define business capabilities not
constrained by technology
• Identify composable
business opportunities to
accelerate innovation
• Create a roadmap to optimize
business using cloud
Build to meet all functional, security,
privacy, and performance needs
Run your business in the cloud
with leading services that:
• Accelerate business
process innovation
• Deliver analytics at the point
of impact
• Enable collaboration within and
across businesses
• Extend turnkey SaaS applications
and drive new innovation with
in-house or third party developers
using IBM IaaS and PaaS
Developers
• Experiment and innovate easily
• Build, deploy and scale
apps faster while eliminating
the drudgery
• Collaborate across teams
and communities and get
rapid feedback
Develop a strategy on how to
leverage an API economy from
internal and third-party sources to
enable a composable business:
• Transform to a development
model where experimenting and
speed are the norm
• Participate in an open market-
place to architect and quickly
assemble your app and collabo-
rate more effectively
• Link to a strong developer
ecosystem with direct access to
IBM and peer developers
Rapidly assemble and deploy
business services to the cloud to
drive growth:
• Open and integrated development
platform with a broad portfolio
of IBM compos­able services
(including leading mobile and big
data, analytics and IBM DevOps
Services), as well as third party
services
• Rapid integration across systems
of engagement, systems of record
and the internet of things
• Defined patterns services for
faster, lower risk deployment and
management of existing applica-
tions across dynamic hybrid
cloud options
Leverage platform and infrastructure
services to accelerate development
and enable dynamic scaling
• Global internet-grade on demand
infrastructure services
• Pre-integrated platform services to
save time and resources
• Open and integrated DevOps
rapid development experience
that scales
IT Managers
• Respond more quickly
• Scale on demand
• Manage it all with ease or have
IBM manage it for you
Develop a strategy to transform IT
and realize the benefits of a dynamic
cloud environment:
• Rely on IBM’s strategy and
planning expertise to identify
business challenges
and objectives
• Leverage IBM’s industry and
technology expertise to help you
identify opportunities for
innovation and growth
• Benefit from IBM’s proven
roadmap approach, with the
specific action points you need
for success
Build a dynamic cloud environment
for your business using the right
mix of on-premise, off-premise, or
hybrid capabilities:
• Speed deployment of your new
private cloud environment with
expert integrated systems and
patterns, on or off premise
• Extend and transform existing
IT into a dynamic cloud with
cloud ready infrastructure
and management
• Dynamically optimize and manage
resources, workloads and ser-
vices -- on premise, off premise,
and across hybrid environments
Leverage best in class cloud
infrastructure and management - as
a service - and improve agility and
service quality:
• Improve agility and reduce capital
expense with instant access to
highly secure, and dynamically
scalable IaaS
• Address infrastructure concerns
with a fully hosted or managed
cloud environment
• Improve visibility, control and au-
tomation of resources, workloads
and services with hybrid cloud
management as a service