Selling the Cloud Sublime - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 87

Smart is the operative word in these IBM commercials and, even
though the visuals have gotten more sophisticated and expensive, the mes-
sage remains what it has been since the series began in 2009: computers,
including the cloud, will construct a smarter planet. IBM departs from
most cloud companies, which have been reluctant to advertise widely for
their business services. Indeed, one industry observer has chided cloud
executives who “think their totally awesome solution can market itself. Once
people try it and see how great it is, they'll be sure to tell their business
associates—right? Well, actually . . . no” (Shaw 2013). IBM has certainly
not been among the reluctant and, in a step unusual for most of today's
advertisers, whatever the business, it has deployed a major print advertis-
ing campaign around the cloud. This includes a print campaign, which
proclaims, in case you forgot the operative term, “Smarter Technology
for a Smarter Planet.” Like most of the company's ads, it does not shy
away from clever hyperbole: “For a technology that's built to be invisible,
cloud computing is making sweeping changes everywhere you look.” It
then demonstrates this with examples from “the mainstream” to “the
revenue stream” (IBM 2012b).
For IBM, by 2012 the cloud, or more speciically, the IBM SmartCloud,
had already made it into the mainstream, bringing “a change in the atmo-
sphere.” Companies can now sell seafood “fresh off the hook,” engineers
can create new medicines from genomics, and tennis tournaments can
serve “dynamic tension outside the venue.” While these do appear to be
far from the examples that conclusively demonstrate “how businesses are
reinventing themselves with IBM SmartCloud,” IBM appears to be more
interested in demonstrating how companies are beginning to move from
these mainstream examples to the “revenue stream.” This represents for
IBM a kind of cloud 2.0 whereby companies move from a cloud “taken
at face value”—that is, as “a conduit for increasing lexibility and reduc-
ing complexity.” Now, “forward-looking businesses are rethinking the
cloud” by taking proitable advantage of new mobile, social, and big-
data analytical capabilities. IBM promises that its customers will be able
to change models for how to do business, disrupt whole industries, and
speed up the process of getting products and services to market. While
some might mourn the demise of the IT department, the SmartCloud
enables conversations that were once limited to the tech experts to take
place across the company. The ad is short on speciics, singling out only