Monthly Archives: March 2022

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IBM WORKS WITH DISCOVER TO CO-CREATE TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS AND MIGRATE TO A HYBRID CLOUD PLATFORM

ARMONK, N.Y., March 30, 2022 — IBM Consulting is working with Discover Financial Services to help the leading digital bank and payments company enhance its digital transformation of applications and existing systems to a hybrid cloud architecture using Red Hat OpenShift.

«Consumers demand faster access to integrated digital banking and payments more than ever, with the assurance that their data will be protected,» said John Granger, Senior Vice President, IBM Consulting. «Embracing an open enterprise hybrid cloud strategy with a secure platform purpose-built for the financial services industry allows Discover to deliver differentiated new experiences.»

Discover plans to migrate and modernize its current systems and applications to an open and flexible hybrid cloud architecture. Red Hat OpenShift will help Discover leverage key capabilities such as security, automation and multicloud service integration to reduce operational costs, deliver better outcomes across business processes, enable faster application deployments, and bring agility with enhanced security and resilience.

«As we accelerate our digital transition journey as a leading direct bank and payments company, it is critical that we have technology solutions in place that help us improve the customer experience,» said Amir Arooni, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Discover. «Working with IBM will allow us to automate, react and deliver solutions more quickly, ultimately driving down costs and helping our customers.»

IBM Consulting also will collaborate with Discover’s teams to utilize IBM Garage and agile techniques to modernize existing applications and co-create new solutions to help Discover derive greater business and technical benefits.

Discover will use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for hybrid cloud automation and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes (ACM) to achieve end-to-end management visibility and control of its cluster and application lifecycle across its hybrid cloud architecture.

Egypt’s Ministry of Finance Automates National Tax System in Collaboration with IBM and SAP

IBM provides an integrated system based on SAP® software
IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation designed to support a smoother, more automated, and well-governed taxation journey

Cairo, Egypt, 9 March 2022: The Egyptian Ministry of Finance announced its collaboration with IBM Consulting and SAP SE to help automate the Egyptian tax system as part of the Egyptian government’s digital transformation strategy.

With taxes representing more than 75% of the general revenues of the state*, the Egyptian Ministry of Finance kicked off a comprehensive national project for the automation and digitalization of the Egyptian Tax Authority processes and procedures to integrate the informal economy into the formal economy, enhance governance over tax return, list the tax community more accurately, and expand the tax base, to lay the foundations for tax justice, and fair competition in markets.

IBM Consulting, in collaboration with its strategic partner SAP, is providing an integrated solution that is based on the SAP® Tax and Revenue Management for Public Sector package. The package is designed to equip the Ministry of Finance with a comprehensive business operations automation platform to help streamline and automate its business processes into intelligent workflows, enhance collaboration and elevate its citizen experiences. The system was successfully piloted with 10 tax offices in Greater Cairo and will continue to expand across Egypt later this year.

As part of the collaboration, IBM implemented IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation designed to infuse AI into the Ministry’s processes and provide taxpayers, tax officers and collectors with a smoother, more automated, and well-governed taxation journey. This can enhance accuracy in taxpayers’ submissions, drive deeper understanding of the tax process and enable the Ministry to focus on higher-value work like minimizing tax evasion and helping increase national tax revenue.

Commenting on the achievement, Dr. Mohamed Maait, Minister of Finance, said: “The project is part of the digital transformation strategy that the government has launched to enhance the business ecosystem in Egypt. The modernization of the current taxation system is also part of the Unified Tax Law and the national vision to maximize public revenues.” Dr. Maait added, “The Ministry is keen to adopt advanced technology in its reform agenda which is why we selected IBM and SAP as partners for the modernization of the tax core system and empowering the e-payments strategy.”

Marwa Abbas, General Manager, IBM Egypt, stated: “We are honored to be leading such a complex project that can help supports the national economy. IBM delivered a tailored solution to the Ministry of Finance in the short term, and based on the roll-out pilot experience, the outcomes were quite successful. We are confident that the integrated core taxation model can support Egypt’s digital transformation journey.”

Jonathan Wright, IBM Consulting stated that: “The automation of the Egyptian Ministry of Finance’s tax system is a critical project to help drive forward the national agenda and elevate citizens’ experiences. We’ve brought our industry, process and technology experience together with SAP’s leading solutions, serving as their valued partner on this digital transformation journey.”

This is the latest example of how IBM is collaborating with ecosystem partners like SAP to help clients modernize their infrastructure and address the needs of the hybrid cloud era. IBM has committed to a $1 billion investment in its partner ecosystem over the next three years. This investment is already supporting collaborations to support customers as they migrate their mission-critical workloads to the hybrid cloud.