"IBM is betting on enterprises consolidating their budgeting and purchasing," says Jasmine Noel, founder and principal analyst at Ptak, Noel and Associates. "This has been happening within IT for some time now as CIOs started initiatives to cut down the number of IT suppliers and the current economic difficulties will only accelerate this for CEOs and CFOs."

Others say IBM emphasized the need to stretch an IT service management strategy across a company's entire asset inventory and plans to lay out exactly how to converge IT and business processes with a new governance consulting practice and IBM Resiliency Consulting Services, for instance. By improving communications and processes across IT and business groups, says Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT Research, IBM can help companies get more out of the infrastructure they have.

"There are literally and figuratively walls and a lack of connections between IT assets and business assets, but we are all moving rapidly toward a future in which it will be possible to connect those siloed assets," King says. "IBM is hitting on something with this approach and doing it in such a way that it could provide real value to customers."

IBM is not only hoping to bridge the gap between IT and business buyers with its software and services. Big Blue also is expanding its technology to take on physical elements that stretch beyond the data center such as power and cooling systems.

For instance, Big Blue unveiled IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management Software, which lets customers automate the reporting of energy consumption by non-IT assets, such as an office building air conditioning system, and generate reports and calculate "what, if" scenarios if the energy dynamics had to change.