Even IBM is fed up with Apple's famously secretive approach to new hardware and software.
This weekend, as the world's best golfers are competing at the US Open in San Francisco, Big Blue is teaming with the US Golf Association to offer both mobile and web apps that let fans follow the action. From an iPhone, iPad, Android device, or an ordinary PC, you can stream live video or follow Twitter feeds or load heat maps of individual holes at the Olympic Club golf course.
Everything works as advertised. But as the tournament approached, IBM was worried it wouldn't. Just days before the first golfer teed off, Apple was slated to unveil a new collection of who-knows-what at its annual developer conference, just down the road from the Olympic Club, and Big Blue was concerned whatever Apple introduced would mess with its software.
When Apple released its new "Retina display" iPads earlier this year, IBM program manager John Kent and his team had to scramble to ensure that their apps for The Masters -- the first major golf tournament of the year -- worked well with the new tablet.
"It's a really big challenge," Kent says of working with Apple products. "[Apple] might guide you, but they don't tell you anything." But he does say that once a product is released, the company is "very helpful."
He also says that when changes are made to Big Blue's software, it's much easier for IBM to update and redistribute applications for Android. Google's approach to its online app store is less, shall we say, strict than Apple's.
These are common -- and rather old -- complaints. But clearly, Apple isn't going to change. IBM is proof that Apple treats all developers in much the same way -- no matter how big they are.
At its Worldwide Developers Conference, Kent had an IBM staffer diligently taking notes. In the end, Apple didn't release anything that would affect Big Blue's plans for the US Open. But in August, Kent and team will be at the US Open tennis tournament in New York, and by that time, Apple may have released its new iOS6 operating system for the iPhone and the iPad.
Will Apple provide any warning on when these changes will actually occur? "You'd think," Kent says, with a hint of sarcasm.
For Kent and team, it's far easier to deal with the infrastructure that feeds data to the applications running on phones and tablets and PCs. Apple may change things on the front-end, he says, but this rarely has an effect on the back-end. This is why so many outfits -- most notably Google -- are pushing for a world where all applications run inside a web browser.
At the US Open, Kent and his team sit in a trailer filled with PCs and flat panel monitors, far from the golf action. Here, they monitor the traffic hitting their applications' back-end. Naturally, their infrastructure is virtualized. As it needs them, the team can readily spin up new virtual servers -- servers that exist only as software.
"I used to know how many servers we had in the data center," Kent says. "It used to matter to me, but it doesn't any more."
Some people call this cloud computing. But whatever you call it, it works.
When the players first teed off on Thursday morning, IBM's application was the only way that anyone who was not on-site could watch the action. The TV networks didn't start broadcasting for another hour and a half. In that time, IBM saw a huge spike in traffic, but then it dropped back down when TV kicked in. USGA pays for the number of IBM servers in use so it wants to be sure that the number of servers in use is just under the number provisioned.
"We don't need to invest in a 100% of what [the traffic] could be," says Jessica Carroll, the USGA's managing director of IT. "We can expect a certain amount and then elastically change on the fly."
If Tiger Woods drains a hole in one, people are going to hear about it and quickly flood the app for replays. But according to Kent, his onsite staff only needs about four minutes to open up the necessary amount of infrastructure.
There's uncertainty. But IBM knows how to deal with it. It's kinda like dealing with Apple. But not quite as annoying.
