Innovation at core for IBM, GlobalFoundries
Time moves fast in the high-tech world, where innovation is a constant.
In the year ahead, IBM Corp. and GlobalFoundries will face anew the need to re-invent strategies to stay viable.
For GlobalFoundries, it will be figuring out how to take over a sprawling semiconductor complex known as the Hudson Valley Research Park when it closes a deal to buy IBM's chip manufacturing business.
"We're working with IBM on the integration planning process," said Travis Bullard, spokesman for GlobalFoundries, which has its own growing plant in Malta, Saratoga County. There are hundreds of elements to cover, such as customers, payroll issues, supplier agreements and tenant relations.
Transfer is expected this year, but neither company is predicting a date until government approvals are in hand.
Soon enough, Global's innovation challenges will include deciding whether its new property, an aging plant, will have a future in Global's strategies. In the first two years or so, the East Fishkill "fab" will do work for IBM and other customers. After that, it remains to be stated.
The entire chip industry has a future to figure. Silicon-based fabrication is reaching the lower limits of molecular structure as it shrinks toward features as small as 7 nanometers. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. The state of the production art now is 22-nanometer chips, such as those used in IBM's recently rolled-out z13 mainframe computers, or 14-nm products put out by Intel Corp.
Other materials may succeed silicon. This shows in IBM's patents, said Richard Doherty, research director at Envisioneering Group in Seaford, Nassau County. "There's a lot of them in there on material science," he said.
Even Intel is not building any new fabs, Doherty said.
"Fishkill has value, but for I don't know how long. I can't say whether it's four quarters or four years, but it's certainly not four decades."
IBM in the cloud
In IBM's case, the big challenge is catching up in "cloud services," a rapidly growing way to get business computing done through remote online access to service providers who have the computers and software.
A key strategy for penetrating the cloud is the mainframe computer made in IBM's Poughkeepsie plant.
"The really key thing here in this mainframe is the hardware is completely new and redesigned from the casters up. Everything is brand new," said Ross Mauri, general manager of System z. "We've enhanced all of the software that runs on it around several key business imperatives and trends going on in the industry."
IBM's sales pitch is that the redesigned z13 is "the ideal cloud architecture" and will have a lower total cost of ownership than competing platforms. The market will tell. IBM has repeatedly shown it can pivot to meet market changes.
Its creativity is shown in 22 straight years of winning the most U.S. patents of any company, with nearly 2,500 of them bearing names from Yorktown, Poughkeepsie or East Fishkill inventors.
Anthony Praino has nine patents from his work in meteorology for IBM. He works on the Deep Thunder system that enables IBM to sell customized weather forecasting to clients as a service via cloud delivery. This system runs on supercomputers based both at Yorktown and Poughkeepsie.
"Some of the focus is done on systems automation," he said, "setting a lot of parameters and setting the system up in a certain way to predict the weather," because doing it manually would be very difficult. The system uses weather models based on "our understandings of the physics of the atmosphere," he said.
Craig Wolf: 845-437-4815; cwolf@poughkeepsiejournal.com; Twitter: @craigwolfPJ
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