IBM's Steve Mills on RealTime

As we prepare for our next RealTime CrunchUp on November 20th in San Francisco, we're seeing if anything an acceleration of the phenomenon known as RealTime. Startups, cloud platform vendors, the open standards community, and virtually every software and hardware category are being refreshed and reinvented in the new model. And while there are many familiar players talking and to some degree walking the RealTime walk, some have been busy for years building and deploying the fundamentals of this "overnight success."A few weeks ago, I traveled to Las Vegas to attend IBM's Information On Demand conference, and took the opportunity to sit down with Big Blue's Steve Mills, Senior Vice President and Group Executive of the IBM Software Group. In English that adds up to Steve being The Man at the helm of IBM's embrace of Web Services, with the software group accounting for one quarter of IBM's $100 billion business. While others have partied down on Web 2.0 and its various social themes in perhaps a more outward facing way, it turns out IBM is very focused in the same areas, albeit with an eye toward leveraging its deep relationships with the enterprise.If raw information accounts for the lion's share of useful data, IBM's investment in analytics and "mining the nuggets" suggests the company's history of eating its own dog food with early realtime technologies like Notes and Sametime will bear fruit as IBM begins to share its best practices with customers. But what of the TwitterSphere, the social media stream of micromessages?