Over the last few years I’ve had a really cool and challenging job – My job was in IBM research. I worked to help our researchers get their innovations to market via customer engagements and trying to get product teams to take those assets and integrate them into products. The basic idea was that we have tons of really valuable technology in research that is struggling to drive high revenue growth for the rest of the company, since it was not a fully supported product. I was really lucky to focus in areas of technology that I love, Internet of Things and Cognitive Technologies. I also helped drive a new process that allowed research assets to be exposed publicaly on the cloud, so customers could experiment with these technologies. The roll was really fun and exciting, but as with any really large corporation, sometimes it is hard to get things going as fast as I’d like.
Well now that I feel we have a good, and repeatable process, for getting these research capabilities into the hands of customers via the cloud, I am moving on to a new challenge. The new challenge will be focusing on the Internet of Things and Cognitive technologies, but from a brand persepctive. I will be working on “big plays” – meaning things that move the needle financially, in these two areas for the Watson IoT business. And I know that I will be leveraging research… So now I will work to get research assets to market in order to drive financial growth and success.
I like to think of this transition in the following way… the last few years I was pushing research capabilities to the business to drive growth, and now I will pull research assets into the business unit to drive growth. I love working for a company where I get these opportunities.
Let’s do this!