IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative is more than smart branding. The initiative reflects smart evolution in IBM’s business model. Over the past decade, the Fortune 500 company exited commodity IT hardware (e.g., personal computers) to make investments in high-end IT, such as data analytics. As IBM’s income from hardware fell from $2.7b to $1.4b, income from software rose from $2.8b to $8.1b between 2000 and 2009. The broader scope and higher-end capabilities positions IBM as a catalyst to advance individual enterprise performance and significantly advance system-wide improvements in health care, transportation, energy, public safety, water and educational systems, or what IBM calls a creating a Smarter Planet. IBM is now positioned to improve how cities – where all these systems come together in a “system of systems” – operate. Thus the Smarter Cities initiative. The aim of the Smarter Cities initiative is to make…