1. China Research Laboratory © 2006 IBM Corporation Globalization Honesty Young, Deputy Director, CTO IBM China Research Laboratory

2. China Research Laboratory © 2006 IBM Corporation VLDB 2006 2 Globalization  Threat ( 危机 ) or opportunity ( 转机 )  Many aspects –Economical, social, cultural, political, environmental, and technological  Freer movement of –Goods, capital, knowledge, information, people, and technology  Enabled mostly by –Reducing the cost of transaction/operation by 1 – 2 orders of magnitude through human innovation and technology progress Communication bandwidth, containerization … Organizations, legal systems, infrastructures …

3. China Research Laboratory © 2006 IBM Corporation VLDB 2006 3 SIGMOD Going Global

4. China Research Laboratory © 2006 IBM Corporation VLDB 2006 4 How a Genius May Work Globally? “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” - Thomas Edison  99% perspiration  performing many experiments to validate ideas –Less expensive to carry out experiments at higher PPP/nominal GDP regions Source: IMF

5. China Research Laboratory © 2006 IBM Corporation VLDB 2006 5 Where Are the Knowledge Workers? Source: OECD

6. China Research Laboratory © 2006 IBM Corporation VLDB 2006 6 An Inter-Dependent Globe Source: China government statistics

7. China Research Laboratory © 2006 IBM Corporation VLDB 2006 7 Implications  Gravitate to the norm and everyone benefits  Even thought not everyone can start something new and big, be the first one to know when a technology matures or will not be practical any time soon –Make an informed decision  Ensure your solution scales with leading $/performance –Globalization is mostly enabled by lowering the cost of providing the similar functions by orders of magnitude  Not a zero-sum game (principle of comparative advantage) –Collaborate openly and globally when appropriate