IBM's board of directors has elected Virginia M. Rometty president and CEO of the company, starting on January 1, 2012. Rometty currently serves as senior vice-president of sales, marketing, and strategy. She succeeds Samuel J. Palmisano, IBM chairman, president, and CEO. Rometty will become a member of the board of directors; Palmisano will remain chairman of the board.

Rometty joined IBM in 1981 as a systems engineer. Her tech bona fides are unimpeachable: She has a B.S. in computer science and electrical engineering from Northwestern University.

Analysts say Rometty's election to IBM's top spot is no surprise. She has worked closely with Palmisano on implementing his vision for a worldwide, service-oriented IBM, and industry observers expect her to continue to pursue that long-term vision.

Rometty is the first female CEO in IBM's 100-year history. Her appointment means that two of the computer industry's largest and most prestigious companies are now led by women. (Last month, you may recall, Meg Whitman became CEO of HP.) It's a significant milestone for IBM and the industry.

Web recommendation: I have a tiny misgiving about the Web page I'm recommending today, the GigaOM article Five ways to keep your rockstar employees happy. My problem is this: I have a visceral reaction against the idea of organizing our businesses around “rockstar” employees. It's a destructive practice. I'm convinced that courting and coddling coding superstars does more harm than good. (I'll have more to say about this in a future post.) GigaOM's article isn't really about rockstar employees, however, but about a simple, inexpensive way to keep all your subordinates happier. It's a good article. J.D. say check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He is convinced that no one reads these biographical blurbs, and it is therefore safe to embed any kind of nonsense here.

IBM CIO, Jeanette Horan, was joined by Guru Rao, IBM fellow and chief systems engineer, at a luncheon on Friday to discuss the company's plans to help their clients utilize cloud services. 

Rao and Horan were joined by IBM client, Professor Giuseppe Visaggio of the department of informatics at the University of Bari. IBM helped Visaggio architect a solution that utilizes cloud technologies in order to help an agricultural consortium in the Puglia region in southern Italy. 

Visaggio said these cloud solutions help small to medium size business - as well as several larger, enterprise-like companies - manage their inventory through the Web. Visaggio said the major issue for these experiments is data security, which must be solved incrementally, something Harvey Koeppel, executive director, Center for CIO Leadership, echoed. 

Koeppel compared security in the cloud to security on the World Wide Web -- eventually it became so ubiquitous that companies had to use it and had to figure out how to secure it. He predicts the same will happen eventually with cloud technologies, especially because of the recent economic crisis. 

Security concerns continue to plague customers however, and according to the speakers, it may be attributed to a lack of education. Some CIOs are unaware of the architected environments or the constraints of older systems, which can present issues in cloud migration. Many seem to be most worried about the lack of control that is often associated with a "virtual" server, expecially after the recent Amazon failure which downed several sites for several days. 

Do you think public clouds will become more popular? How is your company leveraging the technologies? What security concerns do you have? 

Photo by Sue Beyer, Lehigh Valley Express-Times

The announcement today of the induction of former IBM employee Norman Joseph Woodland into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his work on UPC bar codes reminded me of another invention that wasn't realized until years after the idea was hatched. It was the summer of 1974, after my senior year of high school, and I was on line with a buddy of mine, name of Victor, at the Uniondale Mini Cinema waiting to get in to the midnight movie -- actually, it was a "Three Stooges" marathon. The mini cinema was a wonderful place -- you could bring in those leather wine pouches that were the rage back then, and no one complained when the lights went out and sweet smoke filled the theater. But I digress. The supermarket bar code scanner had just been introduced at our local Pathmark, and we marveled at how quickly you could now check out your groceries. Victor, the declared science major, considered other applications of this technology. One that came to mind was toll booths, where drivers hardly ever had exact change, and traffic would back up to the point where it took a half-hour to travel the 16th of a mile through the toll plaza. "What they ought to do," he said (to the best of my recollection of a conversation that took place 37 years ago!), "is put these bar codes on the undercarriage of cars, and put a scanner on the ground, so the car would drive over it and then you'd get a bill in the mail." No longer would drivers be stuck behind others who fumbled for a nickel to throw in the basket, or waited as the toll taker counted out change for a $20 bill. Life in the fast lane! It was a brilliant idea! And, clearly Victor was enthralled with scanning and optics technology; he's been a practicing optometrist for going on 30 years. Yet it wasn't until almost 20 years after that night (when Vic and I also came up with the idea for music videos, but that's another story) that the first EZ Pass was scanned on the New York Thruway. Ironically, Victor has refused to this day to get an EZ Pass, saying he doesn't travel through tolls often enough to warrant having one. This, even after a camping trip not long ago when we sat in a line of cars waiting to pass through the "Cash Only" toll booth as cars with the EZ Pass zipped right by. That, I said to Vic, is a commercial for the EZ Pass if I've ever seen one. He merely shrugged. That's why we're honoring Mr. Woodland now, and not my pal Victor.

Of course, fsck -f -y /dev/node just forces a preen, but it's still funny.

Like many of you, I'm a huge fan of the "Jeopardy" quiz program, and last night's episode -- pitting past champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter against IBM's "Watson" computer -- was truly fascinating. Through the years, humans have been preoccupied with the idea of machines replacing us in many facets of society. From the recent film "Surrogates" to "Terminator" to the works of Nebula Award-winning author Isaac Asimov, many gallons of ink have been spilled and miles of film shot for stories of machines helping society, then turning against us, forcing humans underground to survive. "Man vs. Machine" is a recurring theme in literature and movies, and it played out nicely on television last night. My favorite moment was when show host Alex Trebek

admonished the computer for giving the same incorrect answer that Jennings had just given -- "Ken just said that, Watson!" On straight trivia questions, the computer excelled, as expected. When it had to piece together two different concepts into the same answer, it had its problems. One "answer" was "Stylish elegance, or students who all graduated in the same year." The computer replied, "What is chic," clearly understanding the first part of the answer but failing to grok the second part. I could just imagine the team of IBM scientists behind the scenes, furiously rewriting algorithms for language comprehension. Of course, it's all been taped and decided already, but it'll be interesting to see how Watson fares tonight in the "double Jeopardy" round, and how Jennings and Rutter do as well.

Despite what some other outlets are saying, the Apache Harmony project is not dead. Evidently, Tim Ellison, a senior developer on the project, said things would wind down soon for Harmony. But Geir Magnusson Jr., creator of the Harmony project and member of the Apache Board, when asked if Harmony was coming to an end, said definitively "no."

Apache has no plans to scrap Harmony. IBM wanted to support OpenJDK, and that's fine. At the Apache Foundation, the people are participating as individuals, so IBM is not a member of Harmony. My assumption is those employees that worked on Harmony before will now work on OpenJDK.

And, certainly that's a big loss. It's not a good thing for Harmony at all. But keep it in perspective: For the Apache Foundation, it's up to the community what will be done. We do what the community wants, not what the board wants. We have retired projects before, and if the community decides that's what it wants to do, fine. But there are a lot of phones in this world that are running software that came from the project. Android uses the Harmony class library.

I've begun reporting out the June 15 special report on Agile Development, and I just got off the phone with IBM's Scott Ambler. He indicated the company has created an Agile Process Maturity Model, which will be detailed in a white paper due out in the next week or so.

The maturity model defines three levels of agile process maturity. The lowest level is implementation by small, co-located teams using point tools for such tasks as continuous integration and testing, perhaps using Scrum or XP for collaboration. The next level demonstrates a more disciplined, full life-cycle approach and adds a level of governance. The third level is what Ambler called "disciplined agile at scale." Some critics have called this a mythical level, but Ambler details this in a very recent blog post.

Lining up more interviews now for the rest of this report.

— David

Reports are widespread this morning that IBM's offer of US$9.55 per share for Sun Microsystems has been rejected by Sun's board, and that IBM has pulled it offer off the table. Sun's stock plummeted on the news, down to around $6 per share. It had been stagnant at around $4 per share before IBM's offer, and rose to $8.48 per share on Friday. The Wall Street Journal has the story about the $7 billion deal, which apparently is favored by CEO Jonathan Schwartz but opposed by chairman Scott McNealy.

Apparently, talks continue, but WSJ characterized them as confrontational—not surprising, given the companies' long history of dispute over Java licensing, NetBeans vs. Eclipse, the direction of the Java platform, and more. The paper also reports that there are no other apparent suitors for Sun, so this is IBM's deal. Meanwhile, Sun's board will have to answer to its shareholders if the deal falls through, considering IBM's offer was for more than double what the stock was trading at. So the intrigue and gamesmanship will continue. Both companies stand to gain with the deal, but only Sun would lose if it doesn't happen.

Evidence is mounting that IBM's bid for Sun Microsystems was more than just rumor. The Wall Street Journal reported today that IBM has lowered its bid to between US$9 and $10 per share.

According to the report, the transaction price was in the range of $10 to $11 a share during past negotiations. Sun is reported to have accepted the lower price in return for assurances that IBM will complete the transaction even if it faces scrutiny from antitrust regulators.

With this level of specificity, I'm more convinced that IBM could potentially purchase Sun. However, these types of deals are not over until they are over.