Type Public Website www.ibm.com/jstart Number of employees 27 | Area served Worldwide Headquarters North Carolina | |
Industry Internet, Computer software Key people Rod Smith
(VP Emerging Internet Technologies)
Ed Elze
(Program Director, jStart) | ||
Founded in 1997, IBM's jStart team is IBM's primary client engagement group for emerging internet technologies. The team is part of IBM Software Solutions Group, and is a component of the Emerging Technologies team. jStart is responsible for creating prototypes and solutions for companies around the world, and has frequently launched the first implementations of technologies for introduction into the enterprise.
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History
jStart was founded as a vehicle to engage and validate Java technology with customers/clients. In 1999 it broadened its mission to covering the much wider concept of “emerging internet technologies”.
Timeline of technologies jStart has been involved in:
What differentiates the team from other IBM groups is how jStart validates emerging technologies: it is the primary engagement vehicle for IBM to validate emerging technologies while those technologies are in their emergent stage for enterprise business environments. Because of this, jStart was the first to introduce these technologies into large Fortune 500 IT infrastructures as well as smaller SMB environments by addressing existing business needs (rather than theoretical R&D business scenarios). The team is working to commercialize IBM's Watson system, and is a proponent of cloud offerings. The team is also investigating the role sophisticated data analytic technologies leveraging web-based platforms as enterprise solutions, including the use of Hadoop and text-analytic solutions such as IBM's BigSheets system (developed by IBM's Emerging Technologies Research team).
About jStart
The jStart team has developed a model in which customer engagements drive its exploration of emerging technologies. It does this by engaging hundreds of clients per year to validate emerging technology priorities (using a client driven development model instead of a research driven model). jStart has used this model for each of the technologies it has helped to launch and/or develop. A number of technologies the team has worked with have gone on to graduate into open source projects, have become IBM products, or have been licensed to third parties. Other, less successful technologies, were discontinued when it was determined that, based on client/customer engagements, those technologies were not applicable to enterprise environments.