Middleware Consulting International

As brands and agencies look to diversify their media portfolios in ever-changing traditional web, IBM offers Watson AI for OTT market, where industry collaboration is critical to achieving scale

NEW YORK, April 29, 2021 — IBM today announced the expansion of IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator for OTT and video, designed to help marketers move beyond contextual relevance alone. Accelerator aims to leverage artificial intelligence to dynamically optimize OTT ad creative for improved campaign outcomes at scale, not dependent on traditional advertising identifiers. While compatible with most streaming platforms, IBM is partnering closely with Xandr, an industry leader in programmatic and converged video solutions, to help scale adoption of Accelerator.

According to eMarketer, in 2020 streaming households outnumbered traditional cable households for the first time, and 27% of cable households are expected to switch in 2021.[1] With this growth, many brands may seek to increase their streaming ad budgets to better target their core groups. According to a survey conducted by the IAB, at the end Q1 2021 media buyers plan to increase U.S. spending for digital video, including CTV/OTT, to 20% of their total media budgets this year. IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator allows brands to tailor ads at the individual impression level, enabling personalization to the viewer in the moment with the goal of improving campaign outcomes for brands, translating into a win for consumers, platforms and advertisers.

Originally designed for display advertising, IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator now also brings powerful AI-driven capabilities to video and OTT campaigns. It uses IBM Watson AI to process and action real-time data signals and to dynamically assemble ads to help brands improve campaigns and time-to-value three-fold:

• Accelerator takes manual work out of dynamic creative setup. Creative assets such as different music tracks, video sequences, voice overs, and end cards for video, are organized and fed into Accelerator.
• Accelerator leverages AI to predict and generate impression-level ad variations. It uses Watson Machine Learning to analyze cookieless data signals to predict and subsequently assemble a customized video creative for each impression based on the likelihood of a consumer converting against a KPI.
• For OTT, the KPIs span video completion rate (VCR), various brand site actions and app installs.

All of these capabilities can help marketing teams to test and derive audience insights from a multitude of different creative variables to improve campaign performance.

“Brands continue to follow their consumers to OTT and CTV, especially now as streaming audiences grow across all age groups. However, brands are too often faced with creative resource constraints, fragmentation, and measurement and frequency challenges. The market is in need of advanced technology to help deliver optimal creative at scale, and IBM sees AI as the solution,” said David Olesnevich, Head of Product at IBM Watson Advertising. “Accelerator is designed to help brands make their campaigns effective, perform against business goals and derive measurable results and insights. All at scale – which requires working together with industry leaders. Using Watson AI, marketers can now develop personalized OTT creative for each user and ultimately help improve campaign performance over time.”

Xandr recently announced 75% YoY growth in digital video platform spend and 235% YoY growth in Connected TV platform spend for Q1 2021. Brands and agencies can leverage the Xandr Invest DSP to pilot the Accelerator OTT product today.

“The fragmentation of media consumption habits in an evolving identity landscape underlines the need for intelligent, data-driven technology solutions,” said Doug Hurd, Head of Corporate Strategy and Business Development at Xandr. “Xandr and IBM’s first-to-market capability will power more relevant ad experiences in Converged Video, Connected TV and OTT environments for brands, publishers and consumers alike.”

Accelerator is an award-winning technology, on average driving +127% lift in display performance over the length of a campaign. In initial Accelerator for video internal tests on The Weather Channel O&O digital property, IBM exceeded its own VCR benchmarks by nearly 20%.

HCL CyberSecurity Fusion Centers to Leverage IBM Cloud Pak for Security for Unified Threat Management

ARMONK, N.Y., April 27, 2021 — Today IBM Security announced it has collaborated with HCL Technologies (HCL) to help unify and streamline threat management for clients via a modernized security operation center (SOC) platform. HCL’s Cybersecurity Fusion Centers will be designed to take advantage of IBM’s Cloud Pak for Security, to help create a unified security platform to connect security teams, tools and processes across the threat lifecycle. This collaboration builds on HCL and IBM’s recent alliance expansion to help organizations with digital transformation.

HCL’s Cybersecurity Fusion Centers deliver threat management services to clients around the world through six global state-of-the-art security operations and response facilities. IBM’s Cloud Pak for Security will serve as the foundation to connect security tools, data and workflows with HCL customers. Cloud Pak for Security is an open, containerized software platform which allows companies to quickly integrate a wide range of security data, tools and clouds for deeper insights into threats across hybrid cloud environments.

“Enterprises operating in today’s fast-moving digital world need a cybersecurity strategy capable of tackling increasingly sophisticated threats. Collaboration is key in the cybersecurity industry to build and implement the solutions to stay one step ahead. This collaboration enables us to enhance the service that we provide to our clients and to combine the threat detection and response technologies with the development of technological processes and the experience of our professionals across all areas of cybersecurity,” said Maninder Singh, Corporate Vice President, Cyber Security Services at HCL Technologies.

“Many companies today are struggling with the complexity of security operations amidst cloud adoption and fragmented IT infrastructure, which can hamper their ability to discover and respond to threats,” said Justin Youngblood, Vice President, IBM Security. “Modern security demands an open platform that leverages AI and automation to help security operations teams connect disparate tools, provide insights and orchestrate response across hybrid cloud environments. With this collaboration, HCL and IBM are modernizing security operations and helping clients accelerate their security outcomes.”

HCL is part of IBM’s Hybrid Cloud Ecosystem, an initiative to support partners of all types — whether they build on, service or resell IBM technologies and platforms — to help clients manage and modernize workloads with Red Hat OpenShift for any cloud environment, including the IBM public cloud. Red Hat OpenShift is the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform. The IBM public cloud is one of the industry’s most secure and open public clouds for business. With its security leadership, enterprise-grade strength and support for open source technologies, the IBM public cloud is designed to differentiate and extend on hybrid cloud workloads for enterprise workloads.

An ecosystem to tokenize patents can allow intellectual property to be treated as business assets, making patents easier to license, sell and commercialize

PARIS and ARMONK, N.Y., April 20, 2021 — IPwe today announced plans to begin representing patents as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) or digital assets by working with IBM to create the infrastructure for representing patents as NFTs and storing the records on a blockchain network. The tokenization of intellectual property (IP) will help position patents to be more easily sold, traded, commercialized or otherwise monetized and bring new liquidity to this asset class for investors and innovators.

Tokenization provides greater transparency and can also make related transactions simpler and more cost-efficient. By representing IP in this way, it can be licensed, sold and commercialized. Organizations can also more easily view the IP as an asset on their balance sheet. While NFTs have been used to represent digital art, sports memorabilia and even iconic Tweets, the early adoption of IP-based NFTs could usher in a transformation of how IP is treated by inventors and enterprises.

“The IPwe Platform is designed to transform the patent asset class by increasing transparency and promoting engagement, which we believe will encourage innovation,” said IPwe CEO Erich Spangenberg. “The use of NFTs to represent patents will help create completely new ways to interact with IP. This is expected to benefit not only large enterprises that have significant intellectual property, but it will bring new opportunities to small and medium enterprises and even individual IP owners. We believe it will usher in new offerings by financial services firms and corporations to promote the evolution of a new patent asset class.”

These NFTs will be stored and shared on the IPwe Platform, hosted on IBM Cloud and powered by IBM Blockchain. The IPwe Platform also enables the Global Patent Marketplace, which allows owners and other members of the patent ecosystem to engage and transact, buy, license, finance, sell, research and commercialize patents. IPwe, working with IBM, was the first to create a patent marketplace on the blockchain. The introduction of NFTs will only help accelerate the opportunity for IP, which has been notoriously difficult to manage, value and transact, to be treated as a liquid asset.

IPwe will soon begin trials of its NFTs on the company’s Global Patent Marketplace.

According to IPwe, many enterprises, governments, universities and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) around the world are already using their technology, including the IPwe Platform and the IPwe Registry and Global Patent Marketplace. For SMEs in particular, representing patents as digital assets is especially powerful because it allows IP to be treated as collateral or assurance of an organization’s value, also allowing it to be more easily leveraged when seeking funding. The IPwe Registry collects current, active and historical patent records in a single freely accessible registry with enhanced search enabled by IBM AI. A broader ecosystem including financial institutions, insurers, enterprises and other patent stakeholders are planned in the coming months to support the use and exchange of tokenized patents using these new technologies.

IBM and IPwe have worked together for the last three years applying IBM’s deep expertise in blockchain and artificial intelligence to the IPwe Platform to help protect ownership information; generate patent and portfolio analytics; facilitate transactions; reporting and advancements of the next intelligent generation of patent pooling – an agreement among multiple patent holders to jointly license their IP.

“IBM has a long history of leadership in intellectual property and the application of AI and blockchain in business. Our work with IPwe is another example of our collaboration with leading innovators to drive outcomes powered by blockchain capabilities and digital assets that have the potential to transform entire industries,” said Jason Kelley, General Manager, Global Strategic Partnerships, IBM Services. “As businesses increasingly look to transform how they work with intelligent workflows, blockchain technology is a critical tool to increase transparency and reduce barriers.”

IPwe anticipates tokenized IP on the platform to be commercially available in Q4 2021.

ARMONK, N.Y., April 12, 2021 — IBM today announced that Kyndryl will be the name of the new, independent company that will be created following the separation of its Managed Infrastructure Services business, which is expected to occur by the end of 2021.

“Kyndryl evokes the spirit of true partnership and growth,” said Martin Schroeter, Chief Executive Officer of Kyndryl. “Customers around the world will come to know Kyndryl as a brand that runs the vital systems at the heart of progress, and an independent company with the best global talent in the industry.”

Kyndryl also announced that it will be headquartered in New York City. “The decision to base our corporate team in one of the world’s most vibrant and global urban centers underscores our commitment to the economic health of cities,” Schroeter said.

Kyndryl is a modern adaptation of two words that are central to the new company’s identity and mission.  “Kyn” is derived from the word kinship, referencing the belief that relationships with people — employees, customers and partners — are at the center of the strategy, and that long-lasting relationships must be built and nurtured. “Dryl” comes from tendril, bringing to mind new growth and the idea that — together with customers and partners — the business is always working toward advancing human progress.

“Creating a name is just the start of our journey as a brand,” said Kyndryl Chief Marketing Officer Maria Bartolome Winans. “It will help identify us and support recognition, but the meaning of the name will be built and enhanced over time from our behaviors, aspirations and actions, and what we enable our customers to do. Our vision is to be the leading company that designs, runs and modernizes the critical technology infrastructure of the world’s most important businesses and institutions, ultimately powering human progress.”

As an independent company, Kyndryl will open alliances with a diverse ecosystem of leading technology partners. With the industry’s most experienced talent, and a global base of 4,600 customers, including some of the world’s most complex technology environments, Kyndryl is uniquely positioned to help customers build strong, secure, resilient and adaptive digital capabilities.

About Kyndryl
Kyndryl designs, runs and manages the most modern, efficient and reliable technology infrastructure for the world’s most important businesses and organizations, with the industry’s most experienced services experts.  For more information, visit www.kyndryl.com