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IBM Helps Ecosystem Partners Accelerate AI Adoption by Making it Easier to Embed and Scale AI Across Their Business

ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 25, 2022  — IBM today announced an expansion to its embeddable AI software portfolio with the release of three new libraries designed to help IBM Ecosystem partners, clients and developers more easily, quickly and cost-effectively build their own AI-powered solutions and bring them to market. Generally available today, the AI libraries were developed in IBM Research and designed to provide Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) across industries an easily scalable way to build natural language processing, speech to text, and text to speech capabilities into applications across any hybrid, multi cloud environment.

The expanded portfolio provides access to the same AI libraries that power popular IBM Watson products. It is designed to help lower the barrier for AI adoption by helping partners and clients address the skills shortage and development costs required to build machine learning and AI models from scratch. Developer and IT teams also have the flexibility to embed the new Watson libraries of choice into their applications to help create customized and compelling products without data science expertise.

“Enterprises must commit to a significant investment in expertise, resources and time required to build, deploy and manage AI-powered solutions,” said Kate Woolley, General Manager, IBM Ecosystem. “By bringing to market the same portfolio of embeddable AI technology that powers our industry-leading IBM Watson products, we are helping Ecosystem partners more efficiently deliver AI experiences that can drive business value for their clients.”

With the three new software libraries, developers can easily access AI capabilities and choose the specific functionality, such as natural language processing, that they want to embed in different parts of an application. The libraries include innovations developed by IBM Research as well as open source technology and are designed to reduce the time and resources required for a developer to add powerful AI to an application.

The three new libraries available today include:

IBM Watson Natural Language Processing Library: designed to help developers provide capabilities to process human language to derive meaning and context through intent and sentiment.
IBM Watson Speech to Text Library: designed to enable speech transcription with speed and accuracy to help businesses improve customer service experiences.
IBM Watson Text to Speech Library: designed to enable developers to convert written text into natural sounding audio with accuracy in a variety of languages and voices within an existing application.
This release builds on IBM’s existing portfolio of embeddable AI products, which includes industry leading products such as IBM Watson Assistant, IBM Watson Discovery, IBM Instana Observability, IBM Maximo Visual Inspection and IBM Watson APIs. With IBM’s embeddable AI portfolio, CXOs and other IT decision makers can use AI to uncover business insights and build enhanced end user experiences.

Access Embeddable AI through the IBM Ecosystem
IBM Ecosystem partners and mutual clients are benefiting from IBM’s portfolio of embeddable AI products.

“We are thrilled with our ability to embed IBM Watson Natural Language Processing in our technology so seamlessly,” said Yatharth Gupta, SVP Products, SingleStore. “Helping our clients integrate and use capabilities such as sentiment analysis will be invaluable in driving real time analytics to help them better understand, engage and serve their customers.”

Other IBM Ecosystem partners like EquBot, CrushBank, and Sherloq are using embeddable AI technology in their solutions to make informed investment decisions, enhance help desk interactions, and identify marketing leads through web 3.0 compliance and intelligent website design.

As IBM Ecosystem partners build with IBM’s embeddable AI, there are partner programs to help them at every step of their journey, from building with IBM to go-to-market with IBM. Partners can access these valuable benefits including co-create, co-marketing, and co-sell resources to help drive market demand and grow their business. Today’s news follows IBM’s recent announcement to revamp its approach to skilling, offering partners access to the same badges and selling enablement materials as IBMers, comes at no cost and can be accessed through a simplified digital experience.

IBM Delivers Enhanced Data Resilience and Sustainability for “New Wave” Hyperscalers with the IBM Diamondback Tape Library

ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 20, 2022 — IBM  is extending its comprehensive portfolio of data resilience solutions with the introduction of the IBM Diamondback Tape Library, a high-density archival storage solution that is physically air-gapped to help protect against ransomware and other cyber threats in hybrid cloud environments.

IBM Diamondback is for organizations needing to securely store hundreds of petabytes of data, both traditional and “new wave” hyperscalers – global enterprises aggregating massive customer data sets. It provides long-term storage and is designed to provide significantly smaller carbon footprint compared to flash or disk storage, and with a lower total cost of ownership. 1

“With data breaches and ransomware attacks now a constant threat, we are seeing hyperscale enterprises increasingly turning to the data resilience provided by IBM Tape solutions,” said Scott Baker, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of IBM Storage. “The IBM Diamondback Tape Library provides critical protection against a variety of threats, helping minimize data center floor space requirements and organizations’ carbon footprint. It’s part of the end-to-end data protection and security solution that IBM can deliver.”

“Driven by an explosion in data volume, ransomware, and increased regulatory and sustainability requirements, hyperscale cloud providers are among the biggest consumers of tape storage, and are predicted to drive tape capacity shipments to new levels in 2023,” said Phil Goodwin, research vice president, IDC. “IBM’s Diamondback Tape Library is the company’s latest solution for both traditional and cloud hyperscale enterprises. It is designed to deliver on customers’ needs for scalability, sustainability and security with simplicity and self-service.”

IBM Diamondback is designed to deliver three main benefits:

Sustainability: IBM database is designed to greatly reduce power and cooling requirements for a lower carbon footprint versus spinning disk storage, as tapes sit idle in automated libraries consuming no energy until accessed. Tape’s long-term endurance allows storage of data for up to 30 years. 2

Ransomware protection and cyber resiliency: Organizations worldwide are pressured to strengthen their defenses against malware and data breaches. Tape provides physically air-gapped isolation to increase resiliency against threats.

Data capacity and storage costs: IBM Tape is approximately one-quarter the total cost of spinning disk storage and public cloud archival services, creating a significant cost advantage.
According to a recent IBM IBV study, 48% of CEOs responding across industries say increasing sustainability is one of the highest priorities for their organization in the next two to three years. However, 51% also cite sustainability as among their greatest challenges in that same timeframe.

IBM’s sustainability strategy is driven by an approach that puts sustainability into action by advancing solutions that address climate change and support the transition to a low-carbon economy. As hyperscale cloud providers focus on reducing the environmental footprint of their facilities through lower power consumption, the IBM Diamondback Tape Library is an ally in managing energy efficient infrastructures, built with the same security, scalability, and reliability that is the hallmark of IBM infrastructure.

IBM Diamondback provides cost-effective archival storage for the massive capacity demand of the zettabyte era, supporting vertical markets such as big data, analytics, cloud storage services, the internet of things, healthcare, and life sciences. These organizations typically generate enormous amounts of high-value unstructured data, much of which is stored as archives awaiting future reference, and can often benefit from an active archive implementation leveraging high capacity, low-cost tape systems.

IBM Storage also made news recently with the announcement of the transition of Red Hat storage to IBM Storage, helping deliver a consistent experience from edge-to-core-to-cloud. IBM also recently announced new cyber resilience products, including IBM Spectrum Sentinel for SAP HANA and IBM Spectrum Protect Plus Online Services for Salesforce. When combined with expanded IBM Spectrum Archive support for direct access to file and directories stored on tape, these innovations demonstrate IBM’s leadership in the storage market.

The IBM Diamondback Tape Library is generally available today, October 20, 2022.

Cleveland Clinic and IBM Begin Installation of IBM Quantum System One

Cleveland, OH and Armonk, N.Y. October 18, 2022: Cleveland Clinic and IBM have begun deployment of the first private sector onsite, IBM-managed quantum computer in the United States. The IBM Quantum System is to be located on Cleveland Clinic’s main campus in Cleveland.

The first quantum computer in healthcare, anticipated to be completed in early 2023, is a key part of the two organizations’10-year partnership aimed at fundamentally advancing the pace of biomedical research through high-performance computing. Announced in 2021, the Cleveland Clinic-IBM Discovery Accelerator is a joint center that leverages Cleveland Clinic’s medical expertise with the technology expertise of IBM, including its leadership in quantum computing.

“The current pace of scientific discovery is unacceptably slow, while our research needs are growing exponentially,” said Lara Jehi, M.D., Cleveland Clinic’s Chief Research Information Officer. “We cannot afford to continue to spend a decade or more going from a research idea in a lab to therapies on the market. Quantum offers a future to transform this pace, particularly in drug discovery and machine learning.”

“A step change in the way we solve scientific problems is on the horizon,” said Dr. Ruoyi Zhou, Director, IBM Research – Cleveland Clinic Partnership. “At IBM, we’re more motivated than ever to create with Cleveland Clinic and others lasting communities of discovery and harness the power of quantum computing, AI and hybrid cloud to usher in a new era of accelerated discovery in healthcare and life sciences.”

The Discovery Accelerator at Cleveland Clinic upon a variety of IBM’s latest advancements in high performance computing, including:

Generative Toolkit for Scientific Discovery and other generative modelling capabilities that leverage AI to infer knowledge gaps and generate hypotheses, and ultimately aim to speed up the research process in therapeutics and biomarkers discovery;
RXN, a cloud-based platform that combines AI models and the ability to directly control robotic labs to enable end-to-end design and synthesis of new chemical compounds;
Deep Search, a next-generation AI tool for generating insight from large amounts of structured and unstructured technical literature; and
High-Performance Hybrid Cloud Computing technologies that enable researchers to “burst” their workloads into the cloud and access the resources they need at scale.
The Discovery Accelerator also serves as the technology foundation for Cleveland Clinic’s Global Center for Pathogen Research & Human Health, part of the Cleveland Innovation District. The center, supported by a $500 million investment from the State of Ohio, Jobs Ohio and Cleveland Clinic, brings together a team focused on studying, preparing and protecting against emerging pathogens and virus-related diseases. Through Discovery Accelerator, researchers are leveraging advanced computational technology to expedite critical research into treatments and vaccines.

Together, the teams have already begun several collaborative projects that benefit from the new computational power. The Discovery Accelerator projects include a research study developing a quantum computing method to screen and optimize drugs targeted to specific proteins; improving a prediction model for cardiovascular risk following non-cardiac surgery; and using artificial intelligence to search genome sequencing findings and large drug-target databases to find effective, existing drugs that could help patients with Alzheimer’s and other diseases.

A significant part of the collaboration is a focus on educating the workforce of the future and creating jobs to grow the economy. An innovative educational curriculum has been designed for participants from high school to professional level, offering training and certification programs in data science, machine learning and quantum computing to build the skilled workforce needed for cutting-edge computational research of the future.

About Cleveland Clinic

Cleveland Clinic is a nonprofit multispecialty academic medical center that integrates clinical and hospital care with research and education. Located in Cleveland, Ohio, it was founded in 1921 by four renowned physicians with a vision of providing outstanding patient care based upon the principles of cooperation, compassion and innovation. Cleveland Clinic has pioneered many medical breakthroughs, including coronary artery bypass surgery and the first face transplant in the United States. U.S. News & World Report consistently names Cleveland Clinic as one of the nation’s best hospitals in its annual “America’s Best Hospitals” survey. Among Cleveland Clinic’s 72,500 employees worldwide are more than 5,050 salaried physicians and researchers, and 17,800 registered nurses and advanced practice providers, representing 140 medical specialties and subspecialties. Cleveland Clinic is a 6,500-bed health system that includes a 173-acre main campus near downtown Cleveland, 22 hospitals, more than 220 outpatient facilities, including locations in northeast Ohio; southeast Florida; Las Vegas, Nevada; Toronto, Canada; Abu Dhabi, UAE; and London, England. In 2021, there were 10.2 million total outpatient visits, 304,000 hospital admissions and observations, and 259,000 surgical cases throughout Cleveland Clinic’s health system. Patients came for treatment from every state and 185 countries. Visit us at clevelandclinic.org. Follow us at twitter.com/ClevelandClinic. News and resources available at newsroom.clevelandclinic.org.

IBM Study: Consumers are Ready to Celebrate and Spend for the Holidays but Uncertainty Looms

ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 17, 2022  — According to the annual global holiday shopping and travel report released by IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) Institute for Business Value (IBV) today, many global consumers are ready to celebrate the holidays again and will be shopping earlier than in years past. However, as a wider set of economic and political issues took center stage this past year, new risks, and uncertainty loom over their plans.

The study found that 2022 shopping budgets are up 8% over 2021—in line with Bain’s economic forecast—and holiday travel budgets are up by almost half. However, factors including inflation and price increases have made economic concerns top of mind this holiday season. While 59% of consumers surveyed say they will be less concerned about COVID-19, two in three say they will be more concerned about the economy. 59% of respondents report worrying more about supply chain disruptions that could make holiday shopping harder or more expensive.

“According to the survey results, in 2022, consumers are hoping to re-embrace holiday traditions they’ve had to alter for the past two years,” said Karl Haller, Partner, Consumer Center of Competency Leader, IBM Consulting. “They’re starting their shopping and travel planning earlier but also want to hedge their bets with options like free returns or cancellations. To adapt to these changes in consumer behavior, retailers will need better visibility and traceability across product inventory, fulfillment, and returns. AI can help them understand, prioritize, and resolve critical issues in real time.”

Other noteworthy findings include:

Uncertainty around inflation, gas prices, and supply chain is driving consumer plans

As COVID-19 pandemic concerns abate for many consumers, worries are shifting towards uncertain economic and supply chain conditions this holiday season.

– Nearly half of consumers surveyed will spend less if inflation continues to drive price increases. If they’re forced to cut their holiday shopping budget, over 60% will cut the non-essential categories like apparel, footwear, jewelry, and accessories.
– If goods are not available due to supply chain issues, 41% of respondents say they will spend less – but 30% will spend more if they can find substitutions easily.
– If gas prices go down, 35% of consumers surveyed will do more in-store shopping.

Consumers are making travel and shopping plans earlier but they want to keep their options open
Continuing the shift away from the traditional Black Friday start of the shopping season, 58% of consumers surveyed plan to start holiday shopping before November, compared to 44% last year. Almost two in three plan to pre-order this holiday season to get their products on-time with guaranteed prices.

At the same time, consumers want to keep their options open. Nearly seven in ten respondents surveyed will opt for brands or retailers that offer free cancellations, order changes, and returns, as well as a COVID-19-safe environment this holiday season. The study findings seem to indicate these perks are often worth the price due to the continued worries around supply chain and product availability this season.

Travel is also an area where consumers are looking to get back to normal, while still mitigating any risk associated with potential price changes due to inflation and fluctuating gas prices. The study found that average travel demand will go up by 9% during the holiday season and 78% of consumers surveyed are planning to purchase their airfare before October (61%) or in October (17%).

Sustainability remains top-of-mind for majority of respondents despite economic hardships
Consistent with last year’s report, sustainability remains top-of-mind for consumers surveyed globally. “As more consumers align their purchases with their values, retailers and brands that can provide more environmentally-friendly options could potentially earn a greater share of holiday spend,” said Haller.

Three fourths (73%) of respondents said they are considering sustainability when shopping for the holidays. Twenty-nine percent of consumers surveyed will bundle multiple orders to help reduce carbon emissions, while 38% will avoid single-use plastics, and two in five will choose to shop nearby (42%), and buy products that are branded as being environmentally sustainable or socially responsible (41%). Notably, respondents surveyed are willing to pay an average premium of 41% for sustainable products, 34% for sustainable air travel, and 37% for sustainable lodging this holiday season.

IBV Study Methodology
To better understand consumer perspectives, as well as their plans to shop and travel this holiday season, the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) surveyed more than 12,000 adults across nine countries (Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Mexico, Spain, United Kingdom, United States) in August 2022.

The full study is available at: https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/report/2022-holiday-shopping-travel

IBM Redefines Hybrid Cloud Application and Data Storage Adding Red Hat Storage to IBM Offerings

ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 4, 2022 — IBM announced today it will add Red Hat storage product roadmaps and Red Hat associate teams to the IBM Storage business unit, bringing consistent application and data storage across on-premises infrastructure and cloud.

With the move, IBM will integrate the storage technologies from Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF) as the foundation for IBM Spectrum Fusion. This combines IBM and Red Hat’s container storage technologies for data services and helps accelerate IBM’s capabilities in the burgeoning Kubernetes platform market.

In addition, IBM intends to offer new Ceph solutions delivering a unified and software defined storage platform that bridges the architectural divide between the data center and cloud providers. This further advances IBM’s leadership in the software defined storage and Kubernetes platform markets.

According to Gartner, by 2025, 60% of infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders will implement at least one of the hybrid cloud storage architectures, which is a significant increase from 20% in 2022.1 IBM’s software defined storage strategy is to take a “born in the cloud, for the cloud” approach—unlocking bi-directional application and data mobility based on a shared, secure, and cloud-scale software defined storage foundation.

“Red Hat and IBM have been working closely for many years, and today’s announcement enhances our partnership and streamlines our portfolios,” said Denis Kennelly, general manager of IBM Storage, IBM Systems. “By bringing together the teams and integrating our products under one roof, we are accelerating the IBM’s hybrid cloud storage strategy while maintaining commitments to Red Hat customers and the open-source community.”

“Red Hat and IBM have a shared belief in the mission of hybrid cloud-native storage and its potential to help customers transform their applications and data,” said Joe Fernandes, vice president of hybrid platforms, Red Hat. “With IBM Storage taking stewardship of Red Hat Ceph Storage and OpenShift Data Foundation, IBM will help accelerate open-source storage innovation and expand the market opportunity beyond what each of us could deliver on our own. We believe this is a clear win for customers who can gain a more comprehensive platform with new hybrid cloud-native storage capabilities.”

As customers formulate their hybrid cloud strategies, critical to success is the emphasis and importance of infrastructure consistency, application agility, IT management and flexible consumption consistency as deciding factors to bridge across on-premises and cloud deployments.

With these changes to the IBM portfolio, clients will have access to a consistent set of storage services while preserving data resilience, security, and governance across bare metal, virtualized and containerized environments. Some of the many benefits of the software defined portfolio available from IBM will include:

A unified storage experience for all containerized apps running on Red Hat OpenShift: Customers can use IBM Spectrum Fusion (now with Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation) to achieve the highest levels of performance, scale, automation, data protection, and data security for production applications running on OpenShift that require block, file, and/or object access to data. This enables development teams to focus on the apps, not the ops, with infrastructure-as-code designed for simplified, automated managing and provisioning.
A consistent hybrid cloud experience at enterprise levels of scale and resiliency with IBM Ceph: Customers can deliver their private and hybrid cloud architectures on IBM’s unified and software defined storage solution, providing capacity and management features. Capabilities include data protection, disaster recovery, high availability, security, auto-scaling, and self-healing portability, that are not tied to hardware, and travel with the data as it moves between on-premises and cloud environments.
A single data lakehouse to aggregate and derive intelligence from unstructured data on IBM Spectrum Scale: Customers can address the challenges that often come with quickly scaling a centralized data approach with a single platform to support data-intensive workloads such as AI/ML, high performance computing, and others. Benefits can include less time and effort to administer, reduced data movement and redundancy, direct access to data for analytics tools, advanced schema management and data governance, all supported by distributed file and object storage engineered to be cost effective.
Build in the cloud, deploy on-premises with automation: Customers can move developed applications from the cloud to on-premises services, automate the creation of staging environments to test deployment procedures, validate configuration changes, database schema and data updates, and ready package updates to overcome obstacles in production or correct errors before they become a problem that affects business operations.
“IBM and Red Hat speaking with one voice on storage is delivering the synergies derived from IBM’s Red Hat acquisition,” said Ashish Nadkarni, group vice president and general manager, Infrastructure Systems at IDC. “The combining of the two storage teams is a win for IT organizations as it brings together the best that both offer: An industry-leading storage systems portfolio meets an industry-leading software-defined data services offering. This initiative enables IBM and Red Hat to streamline their family of offerings, passing the benefits to their customers. It also helps accelerate innovation in storage to solve the data challenges for hybrid cloud, all while maintaining their commitment to open source.”

Preserving commitment to Red Hat clients and the community

Under the agreement between IBM and Red Hat, IBM will assume Premier Sponsorship of the Ceph Foundation, whose members collaborate to drive innovation, development, marketing, and community events for the Ceph open-source project. IBM Ceph and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation will remain 100% open source and will continue to follow an upstream-first model, reinforcing IBM’s commitment to these vital communities. Participation by the Ceph leadership team and other aspects of the open-source project is a key IBM priority to maintain and nurture ongoing Red Hat innovation.

Red Hat and IBM intend to complete the transition by January 1, 2023, which will involve the transfer of storage roadmaps and Red Hat associates to the IBM Storage business unit. Following this date, Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus will continue to include OpenShift Data Foundation, sold by Red Hat and its partners. Additionally, Red Hat OpenStack customers will still be able to buy Red Hat Ceph Storage from Red Hat and its partners. Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenStack customers with existing subscriptions will be able to maintain and grow their storage footprints as needed, with no change in their Red Hat relationship.

Forthcoming IBM Ceph and IBM Spectrum Fusion storage solutions based on Ceph are expected to ship beginning in the first half of 2023.

Read more about today’s news in this blog from Denis Kennelly, general manager of IBM Storage, IBM Systems: “IBM + Red Hat: Doubling Down on Hybrid Cloud Storage”

Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only. Red Hat, Ceph, Gluster and OpenShift are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries.

Global Business Leaders Say Hybrid Cloud is Critical to Modernization, Yet Security, Skills and Compliance Concerns Impede Success

ARMONK, N.Y., Sept. 28, 2022 — New global market research from IBM revealed that more than 77% of respondents have adopted a hybrid cloud approach which can help drive digital transformation, yet the majority of responding organizations are struggling with the complexity to make all their cloud environments work together. As organizations face skills gaps, security challenges and compliance obstacles, less than one quarter of respondents across the globe manage their hybrid cloud environments holistically – which can create blind spots and put data at risk.

The IBM Transformation Index: State of Cloud commissioned by IBM and conducted by independent research firm, The Harris Poll, was created to help organizations map their cloud transformation and empower them to self-classify their progress. Built on a foundation that leverages insights from experienced cloud professionals, enterprises can use the Index to gain measurable metrics that can help quantify their progress and uncover areas of opportunity and growth. The Index consisted of more than 3,000 business and technology decision-makers from 12 countries and across 15 industries including financial services, manufacturing, government, telecommunications and healthcare, to understand where organizations are advancing, or merely emerging, on their transformation journeys.

The Index points to a strong correlation between hybrid cloud adoption and progress in digital transformation. In fact, 71% of those surveyed think it’s difficult to realize the full potential of a digital transformation without having a solid hybrid cloud strategy in place. At the same time, only 27% of those surveyed possess the necessary characteristics to be considered as “advanced” in their transformation. So, why the disconnect? A sampling of findings include:

Compliance: Businesses believe ensuring compliance in the cloud is currently too difficult – especially as we see enforcement of regulatory and compliance requirements heat up across the globe.
Security: While businesses have embraced a variety of security techniques to secure workloads in the cloud, concerns about security still remain.
Skills: As organizations face the realities of a talent shortage, they are failing to implement a holistic hybrid cloud strategy – which can create gaps in security and compliance and cause risk across cloud environments.

“As we see regulatory requirements grow across the globe, compliance is top of mind for business leaders. This concern is even greater for those in highly regulated industries. Yet at the same time, they are facing a growing threat landscape – one that demands holistic management of their multicloud environments to avoid the risks of a Frankencloud – an environment that’s so disconnected, it’s difficult to navigate and can be nearly impossible to secure, particularly against third and fourth party risks,” said Howard Boville, Head of IBM Cloud Platform. “An integration strategy to bring together these different piece parts is what we believe separates the leaders from the rest of the pack – the alternative is to pay the price of the Frankencloud.”

“The key value of cloud for businesses is rapid access to innovative technologies, data sources, and applications required to navigate current disruptions and transform businesses. No individual cloud can address all of an enterprise’s requirements, so they must be able to use and effectively control hybrid cloud assets across many locations. IBM with its focus on providing a holistic hybrid cloud strategy is well positioned to help organizations address the security, data management and compliance complexities that can prevent them from taking full advantage of cloud innovation,” says Rick Villars, Group Vice President of Worldwide Research at IDC.

The 2022 IBM Transformation Index: State of Cloud revealed:

Lack of the right skills is inhibiting progress
When it comes to managing their cloud applications, 69% of respondents say their team lacks the skills needed to be proficient. This is a major roadblock to innovation, with more than a quarter of respondents saying skills and talent shortages are impeding their business’s cloud objectives. The effects don’t stop here – these limitations are also preventing organizations from leveraging the power of partnerships. More than one-third of respondents say a lack of technical skills is holding them back from integrating ecosystem partners into cloud environments. This challenge is even greater in the US, where nearly 40% admit to this lack of skills – pointing to the need for talent.

Exposure to cyberthreats continues to lurk despite embracing security techniques
While more than 90% of responding financial services, telecommunications and government organizations have adopted security tools such as confidential computing capabilities, multifactor authentication and more, gaps remain that are preventing organizations from driving innovation. In fact, 32% of overall respondents cite security as the top barrier for integrated workloads across environments and more than one quarter of respondents agree security concerns present a roadblock to achieving their cloud business goals.

Security concerns can even hold organizations back from unlocking the full potential of partnerships. As potential security gaps can cause third and fourth party risks to loom, respondents say data governance (49%) and cybersecurity (47%) are the top challenges to fully integrating their business ecosystem into the cloud. In Brazil, cyberthreats are an even greater concern to ecosystem innovation — 51% say cybersecurity risks pose a major challenge for businesses that want to integrate business ecosystem partners into cloud environments.

Regulatory and compliance requirements remain center stage causing businesses to pause
With regulations on the rise, so too are compliance challenges. 53% of respondents believe that ensuring compliance in the cloud is currently too difficult and nearly one-third cite regulatory compliance issues as a key barrier for integrating workloads across private and public IT environments. In financial services, for example, more than a quarter of respondents agree that meeting industry requirements is holding them back from fully achieving their cloud objectives. These challenges span the globe and are especially prevalent in countries such as Singapore, China, India and Japan.

Based on the Index, IBM will launch an interactive tool to serve as a continual source of feedback for organizations to measure their transformation progress. With the ability to help companies assess how they fare against others, the tool will allow them to identify areas where transformation is stalled and where it may be excelling – unlocking the ability to diagnose and act with efficiency even against the real-world of complexity of cloud transformation.

IBM will make the IBM Transformation Index: State of Cloud tool publicly available in the coming months, aiming to provide business leaders with valuable benchmarking insights that can inform their hybrid cloud strategies. The IBM Institute for Business Value also published a new report, “A Comparative Look at Enterprise Cloud Strategy” with an action guide for how leaders can use the Index to help advance their organizations’ digital transformation.

Methodology:
This survey was conducted online in 12 countries (US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, India, Japan, China, Brazil, Spain, Singapore, Australia) by The Harris Poll on behalf of IBM from June 8th, 2022 to July 17th, 2022. The survey was conducted among 3,014 IT and business professionals in companies with annual revenue over $500M who have deep knowledge of their organization’s Cloud strategy. The IBM Transformation Index: State of Cloud was developed by combining the data from 25+ question batteries of various formats across 9 Cloud-related dimensions that were informed by input from industry experts.

IBM Acquires Dialexa to Speed Digital Innovation

ARMONK, N.Y., Sept. 22, 2022  — IBM today announced plans to acquire Dialexa, a leading U.S. digital product engineering services firm, to help companies drive innovation and achieve their digital growth agendas. The acquisition is expected to deepen IBM’s product engineering expertise and provide end-to-end digital transformation services for clients.

Dialexa will be the sixth acquisition IBM has made in 2022, further bolstering the company’s hybrid cloud and AI skills and capabilities. Since Arvind Krishna became CEO in April 2020, IBM has acquired more than 25 companies. Thirteen of those acquisitions, including Dialexa, have been in IBM Consulting. Today’s news builds upon IBM Consulting’s prior acquisitions, including Neudesic, Sentaca, Nordcloud and Taos.

The acquisition of Dialexa will be IBM Consulting’s first in the fast-growing digital product engineering services market, which is estimated to reach $700 billion by 20261. Upon close, Dialexa will join IBM Consulting, spearheading IBM’s digital product engineering services presence in the Americas.

“In this digital era, clients are looking for the right mix of high-quality products to build new revenue streams and improve topline growth,” said John Granger, Senior Vice President, IBM Consulting. “Dialexa’s product engineering expertise, combined with IBM’s hybrid cloud and business transformation offerings, will help our clients turn concepts into differentiated product portfolios that accelerate growth.”

Founded in 2010, Dialexa delivers a suite of digital product engineering services, helping organizations create transformative products to drive business outcomes. Its multi-disciplinary and highly skilled team of 300 product managers, designers, full-stack engineers and data scientists, based in Dallas and Chicago, advise and create custom, commercial-grade digital products for clients such as Deere & Company, Pizza Hut US, and Toyota Motor North America. Dialexa has deep experience delivering end-to-end digital product engineering services consisting of strategy, design, build, launch, and optimization services across cloud platforms including AWS and Microsoft Azure.

“Digital product engineering represents the tip of the spear for competitive advantage,” said Scott Harper, CEO and Co-Founder, Dialexa. “IBM and Dialexa’s shared vision for delivering industry-defining digital products could be a game changer. We are thrilled to become part of one of the world’s most iconic companies to continue to scale and grow our global client relationships in this rapidly growing market.”

“The Dialexa team has been an outstanding partner for us in deepening our product thinking and assisting in our design practice on some of our key digital initiatives. It is rare to find a partner with such a strong combination of great thought partnership and deep execution capabilities,” said Chuck Rhoades, Chief Technology Officer, Pizza Hut US. “We’re excited about the possibilities of bringing these two companies together.”

The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year and is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory clearances. Financial details were not disclosed.

IBM Announced as COP27 Technology Partner

CAIRO, SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 – IBM – a leading hybrid cloud, AI, and business services provider – has been named technology partner of the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP27, to be hosted by the Egyptian government in Sharm El-Sheikh during November 6 to 18. At the conference, IBM will showcase how technology and consulting can help business and government leaders align sustainability goals to organizational objectives, responding to regulatory demands and without compromising profitability.

This collaboration with the Presidency of Egypt builds on IBM’s history of environmental commitments and alliances, such as establishing a goal to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 or being a founding member of the United Nations Environment Programme’s Science-Policy-Business Forum on the Environment. IBM also enables organizations and communities to tackle environmental issues through programs like the IBM Sustainability Accelerator.

“IBM is honored to be technology partner in this year’s historic COP conference and to help address the existential challenge of climate change,” said IBM’s Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna. “I believe that technology can turn sustainability ambition into action. At IBM, we combine technology and expertise to help some of the world’s largest public and private organizations achieve their sustainability goals, in addition to setting our own strong environmental commitments.”

COP27 President-Designate, Sameh Shoukry, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Arab Republic of Egypt welcomed IBM as technology partner of COP27. He highlighted the critical role that technology plays in helping governments, companies and organizations meet climate goals. Also, he recognized IBM’s expertise in creating innovative solutions that can contribute to push the climate agenda forward.

New IBM LinuxONE Servers Help Reduce Energy Consumption as Clients Increasingly Make Sustainability a Business Priority

ARMONK, N.Y., September 13, 2022 — IBM today unveiled the next generation of its LinuxONE server, a highly scalable Linux and Kubernetes-based platform, designed to deliver scalability to support thousands of workloads in the footprint of a single system1. IBM LinuxONE Emperor 4 features capabilities that can reduce clients’ energy consumption. For example, consolidating Linux workloads on five IBM LinuxONE Emperor 4 systems instead of running them on compared x86 servers under similar conditions can reduce energy consumption by 75%, space by 50%, and the CO2e footprint by over 850 metric tons annually2.

According to an IBM IBV study, 48% of CEOs across industries say increasing sustainability is one of the highest priorities for their organization in the next two to three years. However, 51% also cite sustainability as among their greatest challenges in that same timeframe, with lack of data insights, unclear ROI, and technology barriers, as hurdles. For these CEOs, scaling their business with modern infrastructure can often be one of the barriers to achieving sustainability goals.

“Data centers are energy intensive, and they can account for a large portion of an organization’s energy use. But data and technology can help companies turn sustainability ambition into action,” said Marcel Mitran, IBM Fellow, CTO of Cloud Platform, IBM LinuxONE. “Reducing data center energy consumption is a tangible way to decrease carbon footprint. In that context, migrating to IBM LinuxONE is designed to help clients meet their scale and security goals, in addition to meeting sustainability goals for today’s digital business.”

IBM LinuxONE Emperor 4 is an engineered scale-out-on-scale-up system designed to enable clients to run workloads at sustained high density and increase capacity by turning on unused cores without increasing their energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions.2 In addition, clients can track energy consumption with IBM Instana Observability on LinuxONE.

IBM’s portfolio of sustainability technologies includes solutions to design, deploy and manage energy efficient infrastructures and innovations with a hybrid cloud approach. IBM LinuxONE is one solution within the portfolio designed to optimize data centers by reducing energy consumption and improving energy efficiency. IBM LinuxONE Emperor 4 will be generally available globally on September 14, 2022, with entry and mid-range systems to follow in 1H 2023.

Respond to unpredictable demand

Shifts in the global economy have driven volatility and require flexibility in operational and technical decision-making. Built with the same security, scalability and reliability that has been the hallmark of IBM infrastructure, the next-generation LinuxONE also offers cloud-like flexibility. With a system built for rebalancing of resources in combination with on demand capacity, workloads can scale-up and scale-out dynamically and non-disruptively.

“For CIOs, change is happening at an unprecedented rate and requires organizations to invest in infrastructure that is stable, high value and energy-efficient,” said Bjoern Stengel, IDC Global Sustainability Research and Practice Lead. “IBM LinuxONE provides organizations with a secured, scalable architecture to meet their government regulations and customer expectations.”

At Citi, the bank’s sustainability strategy is driven by a commitment to advance solutions that address climate change and support the transition to a low-carbon economy. Operationally, Citi is focused on reducing the environmental footprint of its facilities, including through improving hosting densities with lower power consumption. Citi is hosting MongoDB on IBM LinuxONE, leveraging the platform’s security and resiliency, as well as elastic capacity to address unexpected demand.

“As our business grows and becomes increasingly digital-first, traditional IT solutions add more physical servers and increase required floor space,” said Martin Kennedy, Managing Director, Citi Technology Infrastructure. “IBM LinuxONE with MongoDB provides vertical scale and critical protection against data breaches and cyber-attacks, helping optimize data centers while lowering our overall carbon footprint.”

Sustainable without compromising security

The new LinuxONE system also features pervasive encryption to protect data at-rest and in-flight, a priority for clients in regulated industries such as financial services. Building on IBM’s cloud security leadership in confidential computing, IBM LinuxONE Emperor 4 protects data in use while providing end-to-end encryption. This comprehensive data protection profile provides businesses with a data protection strategy that underpins current and anticipated future cyber security protocols.

Hybrid cloud platform for cloud and on-premises workloads

Today’s hybrid and multicloud environments require clients to deploy workloads where it makes the most sense for their business needs. IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Virtual Servers provide a public cloud environment in which the cloud tenant maintains complete authority over Linux-based virtual servers for workloads that contain sensitive data. Built on IBM LinuxONE and running on IBM Cloud, this service provides customers complete authority over their encrypted data, workloads and encryption keys – not even IBM as the cloud provider has access.

IBM LinuxONE Emperor 4 supports a large number of Linux and Red Hat OpenShift-certified workloads, including data serving, core banking and digital assets. IBM LinuxONE Emperor 4 receives support from IBM Ecosystem partners, such as Clari5, Illumio, Metaco, MongoDB, NGINX, Nth Exception, Fiorano Software, Fujitsu Limited, Pennant, SQ Solution, Sysdig and Temenos.

With cloud native development on LinuxONE, teams of developers can deliver portable and agile solutions without having to learn a new operating system. IT managers need a system that is easy to operate that supports common tools and provides a foundation for the future. LinuxONE enables managers to focus on delivering new services, instead of managing complexity across a vast number of servers. Based on Linux and Kubernetes, everyone benefits from open standards and an ecosystem that includes modern DevSecOps and cloud native tools.

“Together, Temenos and IBM LinuxONE can help major banks move to a modern architecture in a safe, predictable and scalable way, while reducing total cost of ownership and meeting their ESG obligations,” said Philip Barnett, President of Strategy Growth at Temenos. “Temenos core banking running on the new LinuxONE servers can operate at a fraction of the cost of general-purpose servers and offer great scalability, resilience and speed to market.”

IBM and USTA Announce Multi-Year Partnership Renewal Ahead of 2022 US Open

ARMONK, N.Y., Aug. 18, 2022 — IBM and the United States Tennis Association (USTA) today announced a five-year renewal of their longstanding, 30-year partnership. From the launch of USOpen.org in 1995 to the introduction of the mobile app in 2009, and last year’s debut of the IBM Power Index with Watson, IBM and the USTA have collaborated for more than three decades, today delivering a world-class platform that provides unparalleled, first-of-its-kind fan experiences through hybrid cloud and AI technologies. This year, they will continue to expand and enhance the US Open digital offerings with new features added to the US Open app and USOpen.org ahead of the 2022 tournament.

Building on the popular IBM Match Insights with Watson feature — which analyzes millions of data points and over 100 million sources over the course of the tournament — ‘Win Factors’ brings an additional level of transparency into what is being analyzed by the AI models.. Win Factors is designed to provide fans with an increased understanding of the elements affecting player performance, such as the court surface, rankings, head-to-head records, ratio of games won, net of sets won, recent performance, yearly success, and media commentary. For the first time at the US Open, users can also register their own predictions for match outcomes on the US Open app and USOpen.org, through the ‘Have Your Say’ function. They can then compare their prediction with the aggregated predictions of other fans and the AI-powered Likelihood to Win generated by IBM.

“Our partnership with the USTA provides a unique opportunity to showcase the full breadth of IBM capabilities, against the backdrop of one of the most exciting and iconic sporting events in the world. As we look ahead, the possibilities to continually expand and enhance the US Open digital fan experience are endless,” said Jonathan Adashek, Senior Vice President of Communications and Marketing at IBM. “Together we have created a platform of innovation by activating the same hybrid cloud, AI technology and IBM Consulting services that we use with our clients across all industries to bring the US Open digital properties to life for millions of tennis fans around the world.”

“IBM’s expertise and digital leadership has brought our fans closer to the tournament for the past three decades,” said Kirsten Corio, USTA Chief Commercial Officer. “We are excited to continue to leverage IBM’s innovative tech to serve up the tournament in exciting new ways and deepen global fan engagement with the US Open.”

Win Factors and Have your Say join a comprehensive suite of digital fan features — including the IBM Power Index, Match Insights, and Fantasy Tennis game — on the newly redesigned US Open digital platforms.

The USTA and IBM iX, the experience design arm of IBM Consulting, worked to design and develop an updated website and app designed to enable fans around the world, and onsite at the US Open, to access the tournament, their favorite content, engaging insights and utilities faster and more intuitively than before. The US Open Digital Platforms include many new features. Fans can mark their favorite players to curate their digital experience based on their selections. The Scores, Schedule, Draws, and Players sections have been completely redesigned to deliver more relevant and contextual content and insights. The US Open mobile app introduces a new toggled state called “At the Open” which is specifically catered to the on-site attendee. “At the Open” is designed to provide fans with everything they need to optimize their visit, including ticket access management, mobile food ordering, grounds maps and curated content outlining each day’s events.

The US Open’s digital experiences run on a combination of on-premises, public, and private clouds, and IBM has designed a data architecture that helps ensure the right data — pulling from a variety of data sets and APIs — gets in the right hands at the right time. IBM leverages a hybrid cloud approach to collect, integrate, and distribute data and applications running on Red Hat OpenShift across multiple clouds to seamlessly handle the variety of different workloads required. This year’s innovative solutions were built on IBM Cloud, and containerized using Red Hat OpenShift. The flexibility of the cloud allows for rapid innovation each year, as the IBM developers building these solutions are able to write code for new features once, and deploy it in any environment.