IBM has changed CEOs as well even more recently than HP, but its succession process has been in place for the greater part of a century and the new CEO comes uniquely trained to run today's IBM. In addition, IBM has maintained a massive focus on R&D and currently leads in artificial intelligence technology with a unique division, Watson, focused on this area.

IBM's new initiative, , reflects this vastly more strategic thinking. The concept here is to build systems that are increasingly intelligent, and arrive fully configured with software and with all related hardware wrapped with intelligent components that optimize the solution in place.

This is more of a path than a destination, and much of the benefit will come from how these systems learn and adapt themselves over time. Benefits include faster implementation time, less administrator overhead and near constant optimization of the hardware, networking and storage resources. But even though the initial benefits are impressive, like any learning system in its infancy this one will get dramatically better over time.

This is far more strategic than HP's approach, and it is designed to give IBM an increasing competitive advantage tied to its unique focus on creating ever more intelligent systems.