Middleware Consulting International

SYDNEY and ZURICH and ARMONK, N.Y., Feb. 22, 2022 — Worley (ASX: WOR), ABB (ABBN: SIX Swiss Ex) and IBM have signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on helping energy companies build and operate green hydrogen facilities more efficiently and at scale.

The planned three-party collaboration aims to develop an integrated, digitally enabled solution for facility owners to build green hydrogen assets more quickly, cheaply, and safely, and operate them more efficiently.

Green hydrogen is a form of clean energy made from water through electrolysis, which is powered by renewable energy. While many industries want to invest in green hydrogen, high production costs pose a barrier to driving market adoption and achieving scale over natural gas or blue hydrogen. In addition, production facilities require an accessible and abundant renewable energy supply. This collaboration aims to help customers address these challenges by scaling up technologies and reducing production costs to enable green hydrogen to become more widely used.

Under the collaboration, Worley will provide engineering, procurement, and construction expertise across all stages of the project. ABB will provide offerings for electrical infrastructure, automation, operations digitalization and optimization, and energy management. IBM will provide systems integration services, as well as data framework and management solutions. Together, the three parties will provide operations and maintenance services, leveraging their combined digital expertise.

“This collaboration aims to help turn net-zero solutions into reality. It will build on the key learnings of our ground-breaking Ambition to Reality paper, written in collaboration with Princeton University, USA. By fast-tracking and standardizing how we engineer-design-operate, this collaboration is expected to reduce the levelized cost of green hydrogen and help our customers to decarbonize their operations further,” says Chris Gill, Senior Vice President of Low-carbon Hydrogen at Worley.

“Hydrogen is at the heart of the energy transition and is essential to decarbonizing a wide range of hard-to-abate industries. Together with Worley and IBM, we’re dedicated to enable a new concept to accelerate the adoption of low carbon hydrogen and efficiently meet the growing demand. Complementing our partners expertise with our electrification, automation and digital solutions, we will aim to enable lower production costs through smart, safe and sustainable operations,” says Bruno Roche, Vice President, Energy Transition at ABB Energy Industries.

“While many industries have been able to adopt wind and solar to help decarbonize operations, energy-intensive industries, such as petrochemical, cement and steel, require heat temperatures and combustion that cannot be achieved with these renewables. Green hydrogen can help address these distinct needs in a more scalable sustainable way. IBM’s collaboration with Worley and ABB aims to address those challenges by combining expertise and solutions from all three companies into a distinct ecosystem of industry leaders to help form a repeatable process to build, operate and manage green hydrogen facilities. We believe this kind of collaboration is critical to achieving decarbonization goals,” says Zahid ‘Z’ Habib, Vice President, Global Energy & Resources Industry Leader, IBM Consulting.

The planned relationship is subject to the parties reaching definitive agreements.

Adds deep cloud and data expertise to seize the $200 billion[1] cloud consulting market opportunity

ARMONK, N.Y., Feb. 15, 2022 — IBM today announced it has acquired Neudesic, a leading U.S. cloud services consultancy specializing primarily in the Microsoft Azure platform, along with bringing skills in multicloud. This acquisition will significantly expand IBM’s portfolio of hybrid multicloud services and further advance the company’s hybrid cloud and AI strategy.

IBM continues to invest in its hybrid cloud and AI strategy, expanding its cloud services technology, skills and capabilities to meet the growing demand of clients’ hybrid cloud needs. Including Neudesic, IBM has acquired more than 20 companies — 12 in IBM Consulting alone — since Arvind Krishna became CEO in April 2020. Today’s news builds upon IBM’s prior acquisitions of cloud transformation capabilities, including Sentaca, SXiQ, BoxBoat, Nordcloud and Taos.

To improve operational agility, businesses are investing aggressively in their application portfolio, and according to IDC, 69 percent of companies worldwide view application modernization as a top or high priority². The ability to accelerate digital transformation through application development, modernization and data capabilities, powered by the cloud, plays a significant role in achieving their operational goals. Yet enterprises are facing an acute cloud-native skills shortage.³

“As one of the leading cloud platforms, Microsoft Azure is key to many of our clients’ ability to modernize and innovate,” said John Granger, Senior Vice President, IBM Consulting. “Neudesic adds deep Azure cloud, data engineering and data analytics expertise to accelerate our clients’ hybrid cloud journeys. This builds upon IBM’s prior acquisitions of cloud transformation capabilities last year.”

“Customers are driving incredible acceleration across Microsoft cloud services, and it’s more important than ever to have trusted partners, like IBM, skilled in our technology,” said Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, Microsoft. “Neudesic and Microsoft are enabling enterprises to achieve their business outcomes with our Azure platform, leveraging a combination of services and IP. With this acquisition, IBM Consulting is gaining even more capabilities and assets to help customers succeed on their digital transformation journeys.”

Headquartered in Irvine, California, Neudesic has more than 1,500 cloud and data experts located across the U.S. and in India. Neudesic provides a full scope of digital transformation services across advisory, application development, cloud migration, DevOps, integration, data engineering, data visualization and hyper-automation. As a top Microsoft global solution partner, Neudesic has deep expertise in technology transformation and delivering Microsoft Azure cloud services to clients across the health and life sciences, financial services, energy and utilities, professional services and retail industries.

Neudesic’s cloud and data consultants will join IBM Consulting’s growing hybrid cloud services business, enhancing IBM’s ability to help clients meet their business needs with multicloud technologies. Neudesic extends IBM Consulting’s skills and certifications across the hybrid cloud ecosystem including Microsoft, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Databricks, Snowflake, Denodo, Kubernetes, MuleSoft, RedHat, Salesforce, UIPath, SAP and Oracle.

“As a Microsoft Gold Partner with multiple Azure competencies, Neudesic is excited to enhance IBM’s hybrid cloud strategy with extensive Azure capabilities,” said Parsa Rohani, Co-Founder and CEO, Neudesic. “The combination of our capabilities with IBM’s hybrid cloud vision and scale will drive even more impactful innovation for clients.”

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. IBM and Neudesic signed a definitive agreement leading to today’s acquisition in IBM’s fourth quarter 2021.

IBM’s investment advances UF’s ‘AI University’ initiative

ARMONK, N.Y., Jan. 11, 2022 — IBM today announced it has acquired Envizi, a leading data and analytics software provider for environmental performance management. This acquisition builds on IBM’s growing investments in AI-powered software, including IBM Maximo asset management solutions, IBM Sterling supply chain solutions and IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite, to help organizations create more resilient and sustainable operations and supply chains. This acquisition closed on January 11, 2022. Financial details were not disclosed.

Companies are under mounting pressure from regulators, investors, and consumers to progress toward more sustainable and socially responsible business operations – and to demonstrate these measures in a robust and verifiable way. In fact, corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability risks tied as the third highest concerns for organizations, as ranked by large corporations in a 2021 Forrester report. However, the various types of data companies need to understand and report on sustainability initiatives remains highly fragmented and difficult for all relevant parties to access.

Envizi’s software automates the collection and consolidation of more than 500 data types and supports major sustainability reporting frameworks. Its user-friendly and easily customized dashboards enable companies to analyze, manage and report on environmental goals, identify efficiency opportunities and assess sustainability risk. Envizi’s solutions help streamline the management of these tasks as part of broader Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting initiatives, while also providing users with valuable sustainability insights to inform business strategy.

By using Envizi with IBM’s broader AI-powered software, companies will now be able to automate the feedback generated between their corporate environmental initiatives and the operational endpoints being used in daily business operations – a crucial step in making sustainability efforts more scalable. For instance, Envizi will integrate with:

• IBM Maximo asset management solutions, which help companies extend the life of their critical assets, reduce environmental impact by providing intelligent asset management, monitoring, predictive maintenance and reliability in a single platform.
• IBM Sterling supply chain solutions, which help companies gain supply chain visibility, cut waste by right-sizing inventory, reduce the carbon footprint of shipment and logistics, and ensure responsible sourcing with blockchain-based technology for traceability.
• IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite (EIS), which helps companies increase resiliency by assessing and planning for the impact of environmental conditions on their operations, assets, and supply chains. EIS uses advanced AI and weather technology from IBM, the most accurate forecasting provider globally.
• IBM Turbonomic and Red Hat OpenShift capabilities, which help companies automate decision making when considering where to run enterprise workloads based on optimization of performance, cost and GHG emissions.

Envizi will also help expand IBM Consulting’s growing sustainability practice, which is designed to help clients accelerate progress toward their sustainability commitments.

“To drive real progress toward sustainability, companies need the ability to transform data into predictive insights that help them make more intelligent, actionable decisions every day,” said Kareem Yusuf, PhD, General Manager, IBM AI Applications. “Envizi’s software provides companies with a single source of truth for analyzing and understanding emissions data across the full landscape of their business operations and dramatically accelerates IBM’s growing arsenal of AI technologies for helping businesses create more sustainable operations and supply chains.”

Available as a SaaS solution and running in multi-cloud environments, Envizi serves leading brands such as Microsoft, Qantas, CBRE, Uber, abrdn and Celestica, and its software can be applied to activities across a variety of industries.

“As a leader and innovator in AI for business, IBM has decades of experience helping organizations around the world harness the power of their data and act on it,” said David Solsky, CEO and Co-Founder, Envizi. “IBM’s global reach, depth of resources and breadth of expertise will help us to scale at an unprecedented pace. As part of IBM, we feel more confident than ever that we can achieve our goal of providing clients and partners with the world class tools they need to reduce their operational impacts and optimize for the low carbon future.”

Beyond its ongoing investments in providing clients the most comprehensive AI software to help them accelerate their sustainability initiatives and support their environmental goals, IBM is also using its software to improve its own operational efficiencies, manage energy consumption and drive GHG emissions reduction.  These activities support IBM’s commitment to reach net zero GHG emissions by 2030.

LG Electronics joins IBM Quantum Network and aims to explore applications of quantum computing to support big data, artificial intelligence, connected cars, digital transformation, IoT, and robotics applications

SEOUL, South Korea, Jan. 10, 2022 — IBM today announced that LG Electronics has joined the IBM Quantum Network to advance the industry applications of quantum computing.

By joining the IBM Quantum Network, IBM will provide LG Electronics access to IBM’s quantum computing systems, as well as to IBM’s quantum expertise and Qiskit, IBM’s open-source quantum information software development kit.

LG Electronics aims to explore applications of quantum computing in industry to support big data, artificial intelligence, connected cars, digital transformation, IoT, and robotics applications – all of which require processing a large amount of data.

With IBM Quantum, LG can leverage quantum computing hardware and software advances and applications as they emerge, in accordance with IBM’s quantum roadmap. By leveraging IBM Quantum technology, LG will provide workforce training to its employees, permitting LG to investigate how potential breakthroughs can be applied to its industry.

“Based on our open innovation strategy, we plan to use IBM Quantum to develop our competency in quantum computing,” said Byoung-Hoon Kim, CTO and Executive Vice President of LG Electronics. “We aim to provide customers with value that they have not experienced so far by leveraging quantum computing technology in future businesses.”

“We’re happy to welcome LG Electronics to a growing quantum computing ecosystem in Korea at an exciting time for the region,” said Jay Gambetta, IBM Fellow and VP, Quantum Computing at IBM. “The relationship between IBM and LG Electronics will permit LG to explore new types of problems associated with emerging technologies and will help strengthen the quantum capabilities in Korea.”

Quantum computing is an exciting evolution in computation. While classical computers calculate in bits that represent 0 and 1, quantum computers use qubits that harness quantum mechanical phenomena such as interference and entanglement in computation to solve problems that are fundamentally intractable for classical computers. As a result, quantum computing is well suited to help explore new approaches of solving problems like those in LG Electronics’ open innovation strategy including big data, artificial intelligence, connected cars, digital transformation, IoT, and robotics applications.

At the IBM Quantum Summit in November 2021, IBM recently unveiled its new ‘Eagle’ quantum computing processor with 127 qubits, a major step forward in IBM’s roadmap to reach Quantum Advantage.

There are more than 170 clients, including ‎ LG Electronics, Fortune 500 companies, start-ups, academic institutions and research labs working with IBM Quantum technology to advance ‎quantum computing and explore practical applications. The IBM Quantum team and clients are researching and exploring how quantum computing will help a ‎variety of industries and disciplines, including finance, energy, chemistry, materials science, ‎optimization and machine learning, among many others.