"How could the economic downturn impact on customers and the industry?" IBM's Steve Mills was asked this week. Mills, who is Senior Vice President and Group Executive of IBM's Software Group, was blunt: "There is more uncertainty at this time that most of us have experienced in our lifetimes," he conceded, before adding: "Nonetheless, Information Technology continues to provide the ability to operate a business more efficiently."

Mills was speaking during a roundtable discussion at IBM's "Information on Demand 2008" event in Las Vegas, Nevada.

He continued: "IT is the core transforming technology of the second half of the twentieth century and it will be for hundreds of years to come. Volume, speed - none of those things can be handled by human beings, we all understand this. We need the computer as an essential tool in order to help us manage things for greater effectiveness and greater efficiency."

"If I am faced with capital budget constraints, I need to manage the assets that I already have they need to last longer. I need to get more use of them, I want to instrument them, control them, manage them, for greater effectiveness. I am going to use IT to do that."

In the same panel, Mills also mentioned IBM's very recently announced Cloud computing initiatives, specifically Bluehouse - part of broader cloud services initiative at IBM that includes helping independent software developers turn their applications into SaaS services.