Enterprise tech giant IBM used its keynote presentation at Cloud World Forum 2015 to talk up the role of the digital economy, especially cloud tech, to drive innovation and disruption.

The speaker was Sandy Carter, GM of Cloud Ecosystem and Developers at IBM. The premise of her keynote was that the digital economy is driving innovation and chose five specific illustrations of this.

The first was the use of real-time data by Wimbledon.com, which for 50 weeks of the year is quiet, but then explodes when the tennis tournament is underway – 65 million page views last year. The point Carter wanted to make is that with the help of cloud solutions such as IBM’s Bluemix, which inevitably got frequent mentions, Wimbledon is able to not just scale up its resources but use analytics and even social media cues to anticipate demand in real-time.

The second example concerned IoT, via the example of German company Diabetizer, which uses wearables and the cloud to help people manage diabetes and to communicate with health professionals. The significance in this context was the point that IoT is essentially about data and what you do with it.

The remaining examples of cloud-enabled innovation focused on mobile, the hybrid cloud and a final rallying call for the Bluemix ecosystem. The general thread was that the flexibility, analytics and collaboration power (there was a nod to yesterday’s Box announcement) afforded by the cloud is the foundation of innovation today.