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As the Mets blow a two-run lead and the Orioles pull ahead, Wladawsky warms to the topic. "To know which pitcher is better against which batters, you need all the information you can get," he says, just as Mets hurler Mike Hampton is pulled for giving up three runs in the seventh. "And you're in it for the long haul. It's not only how you win today, it's how you'll win for the season." A stretch to be sure, but Wladawsky -- an inveterate Mets fan who often takes customers to games -- is confident IBM's Linux effort will be a home run. IBM in January announced it would configure all of the computers it makes -- from $1,500 Internet servers to $3 million mainframes -- to run on Linux. When it came time to name someone to oversee that effort, Wladawsky was an easy choice. In his previous job, he coordinated IBM's Internet businesses -- and was so successful that, ironically, his division was shut down, since top brass felt the Net had been integrated into every corner of the company. "Irving did a great job with the Internet, and he's simply the right guy to bring Linux together," says Wladawsky's boss, Sam Palmisano, who heads up IBM's heavyweight server-computer division. SUPERCOMPUTER PUSH. At first blush, Wladawsky doesn't seem like the type to handle such a high-profile task for buttoned-down Big Blue. With big, droopy eyes, an easy smile, and Ross Perot ears, he comes off like a low-key professor at a liberal-arts college. He speaks with a lilting Spanish accent, a remnant of his childhood in prerevolutionary Cuba, where he was born to shopkeepers who had emigrated from Eastern Europe. After Castro came to power, Wladawsky's family fled to the U.S. and settled in Chicago in 1960. Once he had finished high school, Wladawsky enrolled in the University of Chicago, staying until he got a PhD in physics in 1972. When funding for a post-doctorate fellowship at Harvard University fell through, he grudgingly accepted a post with IBM's research labs in New York. "I felt guilty when I left the university," he says. "I was supposed to go into academia." But Wladawsky ended up liking the change. He worked his way up in IBM's research division and, by 1976, had earned enough seniority to take a sabbatical. Although he had considered going to a university for another year of research, one of his bosses suggested he spend the year in the company's vast marketing organization instead. "Almost on a lark, I tried it -- and I loved it," Wladawsky recalls. "For the first time, I was involved in concrete problems." He returned to research a year later but soon took on a more managerial role. By the mid-'80s, he was heading IBM's push into supercomputers, and in 1995, he was appointed to oversee the Internet effort. Now Wladawsky faces a task at least as daunting. IBM has committed itself to the Linux operating system at a time when most other companies are just dabbling in it. "Linux today is like the Internet was in 1995," Wladawsky says. "The challenge is to craft a strategy that brings it all together for IBM." His job is to ensure that every software program IBM writes, every computer it makes, will work flawlessly with Linux. First up: The 1,000 new programmers the company plans to hire must make the operating system reliable enough for demanding corporate customers. While the company isn't abandoning the half-dozen other operating systems it currently supports, Wladawsky says, they will grow more similar to Linux as the effort progresses. A COOL SUN. Plenty of people think IBM doesn't have it quite right. By keeping all of the other systems alive, the company is "hedging its bets rather than being single-minded and storming ahead," says Goldman Sachs analyst Laura Conigliaro. And Sun Microsystems believes its Solaris operating system will be dominant -- with good reason. Sun has seen its sales, especially to Web upstarts, shoot through the roof: Revenues were up by 35% in the most recent quarter. That has made Solaris the de facto standard for many Internet companies. Sun boasts that its focus on a single operating system will give it a leg up on IBM and its half-dozen flavors. IBM "needs a systems-integration company just to deal with their own price list," quips Sun Chairman Scott McNealy. Wladawsky counters that even Sun will one day embrace Linux and the so-called open-source software movement, which promotes Linux and other free-software systems. Developers, he says, are turning in growing numbers to Linux, ensuring it will have a strong future. And as the pace of innovation quickens, developers will prefer to write their programs for one standard understood by everyone, rather than accommodating today's patchwork of proprietary systems. "Sun and everyone else will come to the same conclusion we have -- that the industry wastes a lot of time" adapting software to so many different operating systems, Wladawsky says. To be successful, Wladawsky will need to rally IBM's technical troops. But just as important, he's got to fire up executives, board members, and investors. And there, he's got an advantage. While Wladawsky can hold his own with the geeks, he's also able to explain tough concepts to a nontechnical audience. In his role as co-chair of the President's Information Technology Advisory Council, a White House-appointed group that counsels the government, he often decodes tech issues for politicians. "Irving comes up with great analogies to help people understand the complicated problems we're dealing with," says Vinton G. Cerf, a council member and senior vice-president for phone company WorldCom. PLAYING AGAINST HISTORY. When Wladawsky feels he's not getting through, friends say, he can always fall back on baseball. He learned the game during his childhood in Cuba and has been a devoted fan ever since. "If you ask Irving about last night's game, forget technology -- he'll start telling you everything about the Mets," says Don Haile, chief information officer for Fidelity and an ex-IBM colleague of Wladawsky. As the game continues into the bottom of the seventh and the Mets go down 4-2, Wladawsky keeps working the baseball analogy: To succeed on the diamond or in the market takes teamwork and cooperation. "Every player is playing against history -- that's the romance of baseball," Wladawsky says. As manager of IBM's Linux team, he's playing against history, too. And while it's still early in the game, Wladawsky stands a good chance of getting into the IBM record books if he and his team hit the Linux ball out of the park. Rocks covers IBM for Business Week in New York |
