Big Blue's boffins

17 August 2007

IBM claims that the 3,000 engineers at its Hursley lab aren't just doing a job, they're 'inventing the industry' - which probably comes as a surprise to everyone else doing their little bit to move the tech world forward. Still, we took a trip to the labs last week to see what the boffins are working on.

Located near Winchester, Hursley is the largest dedicated software research lab in Europe and part of a network of 60 development locations around the world. For such a cutting-edge environment, it's also quaintly English, with its reception located in a historic house where the Spitfire engine was built by Vickers Engineering.

Today it's the worldwide centre for IBM's websphere middleware development, with transaction processing systems originating from this lab responsible for more than 105bn transactions per day in banking, insurance, shipping, automotive, industry and government. Storage, messaging, workflow and Java tools are also developed here, along with an emerging technologies team that's looking at the likes of Web 2.0 and virtual worlds.

Even IBM seems to be getting a little carried away by the current fascination with Second Life. It showed, for example, how an ATM banking channel in Second Life could be linked to a real payments system using web services to authorise payments in real-time. On a more grounded footing, a Web 2.0 retail demo, developed for Kingfisher's recent Innovation Day, showed how DIY projects could be pieced together collaboratively online. But that too was used as an excuse to link to Second Life, showing how you could visualise the project in a virtual world.

One practical use of all this expertise was demonstrated by the splendidly titled 'IBM Metaverse technology evangelist', Roo Reynolds, whose explorations extend beyond Second Life to demonstrate how a business community might create its own virtual world behind the firewall.

For a really clear use of Web 2.0, meanwhile, see IBM's QEDWiki, which simplifies Web 2.0 application development by allowing users to quickly create just-in-time applications and mash-ups that bind rich content from different sources. IBM demo-ed a shipping application which combined Google maps with a Reuters news feed for local news and a weather service. It used widgets to create new utilities that pull content out of these various services - and the whole things runs in a browser.

Much of the detail of this development work is available to try out on IBM's Alphaworks site.

But perhaps the most impressive of IBM's initiatives is a programme called Made in IBM Labs. This is designed to increase the number of engagements between researchers, developers and clients - and the number shot up to 10,000 last year. While some have complained that IBM is concentrating too much on the D in R&D in all of this, as a strategy for making innovation real, you can hardly fault it.

By David Longworth