The list was distilled from conversations and presentations at IBM’s EMEA analyst conference; Analyst Insights 07.

1. IBM’s Cell chip has become a rapid success. It’s the engine of Sony’s PS3 and it is also in use in a variety of commercial areas, including health devices, consumer electronics and specialist devices in the military, aerospace, etc.
2. IBM’s Power chip goes from strength to strength. In the games market it is the competitor to the Cell chip – the CPU for the XBox and the Nintendo Wii. It’s also one of the reasons that IBM’s pSeries business is going gangbusters.
3. Not wanting to harp on about the Power chip, but IBM is projecting that it will produce a 10 petaflops computer by 2010. That’s about 10x faster than today’s fastest bad ass computer (What’s a petaflop? It’s what a teraflop becomes when it grows up).

Add it all up and you have to conclude that IBM is fiercely competitive in most of its business lines.

4. IBM does engineering consultancy. It is behind many devices from many electronics brand names, having collaborated in building everything from high definition TVs to mobile phones. This is no small business for IBM
5. IBM is ahead in virtualization. It is the first computer server company to produce a complete virtual architecture. Particularly impressive, and I believe useful is its virtual storage.You want virtual? IBM’s got it.
6. IBM does blades better than the competition right now. In it’s Bladecenter, everything; disk, tape, etc. can be plugged in as a blade.
7. The mainframe market continues to grow. IBM is now pushing the mainframe as the center piece of a consolidation strategy – and demonstrating what it can achieve by consolidating 3900 of its own Unix servers onto 30 mainframes. (Apart from the floor-space gained, you get performance improvements, management economies and reduced heating problems).
8. IBM knows SOA. It does SOA comprehensively from the software (it has a very comprehensive stack) through to the build (it has many consultancy engagements). And by the way, SOA is now mainstream.
9. IBM is committed to cool. As far as data center cooling is concerned, it is in the game at every level from the chip through the server devices to heat flows in computer rooms. (Nowadays this is obligatory for a server vendor, but IBM competes strongly in this area)
10. IBM claims that “Big blue is big green”. But it’s not simply hype to convince the world that IBM isn’t melting the poles and killing polar bears. IBM now has specialist consultancy activity that can help a company to reduce its carbon foot-print – and it’s comprehensive. It covers every aspect of “green” from energy efficient property to the organizational impact of telecommuting.

Add it all up and you have to conclude that IBM is fiercely competitive in most of its business lines. It doesn’t look like much of a dinosaur to me.