Middleware Consulting International

ARMONK, N.Y., Nov. 7, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a major evolution of its flagship IBM QRadar SIEM product: redesigned on a new cloud-native architecture, built specifically for hybrid cloud scale, speed and flexibility. IBM also unveiled plans for delivering generative AI capabilities within its threat detection and response portfolio – leveraging watsonx, the company’s enterprise-ready data and AI platform.

Today’s hybrid cloud environments are evolving and scaling at an exponential rate, creating a larger and more complex attack surface to protect. This growing IT footprint makes it harder to quickly find the true threats amongst the noise – slowed down by siloed technologies, manual searches and an overload of alerts, without clear context or visualizations. In fact, SOC professionals get to less than half (49%) of the alerts that they’re supposed to review within a typical workday, according to a recent global survey.¹

The new cloud-native QRadar SIEM is built to maximize the power of today’s security teams. It is designed to augment and up-level security analysts daily work – tapping AI to manage time-consuming and repetitive tasks while empowering security analysts to find and respond to high priority security incidents more effectively.

“Our new cloud native SIEM is a core element of IBM’s mission to usher in the next generation of security operations, built for the hybrid cloud and AI era,” said Kevin Skapinetz, Vice President, Strategy and Product Management, IBM Security. “Instead of forcing analysts to work around the complexity of security technologies, we’re designing technology to remove the complexity – weeding out the noise, simplifying the user experience, and empowering analysts to tackle urgent threats with greater speed and confidence.”

IBM’s cloud-native SIEM builds on QRadar’s 13 years market leadership and analyst recognition² for deep security analytics – with a redesigned architecture for highly efficient data ingestion, rapid search and analytics at scale. Built on an open foundation, it is the newest addition to QRadar Suite, IBM’s integrated portfolio of threat detection and response software.

The new cloud-native QRadar SIEM will be generally available as SaaS in Q4 2023, with plans to offer software for on-premises and multi-cloud deployment in 2024.

Open at its Core
Built on Red Hat OpenShift, QRadar SIEM is designed to be open at a foundational level – allowing for deeper interoperability with multi-vendor tools and clouds. It leverages open source and open standards for core functions including detection rules and search language – allowing it to work across companies’ broader security and technology stacks.

• Harness Security Community Detections: Leverages common, shared language for detection rules (SIGMA) – allowing clients to quickly import new, crowdsourced detections directly from the security community as threats evolve.
• Investigate Across Data Sources: Offers unique federated search and threat hunting capabilities built on open-source technologies, allowing analysts to proactively search for and investigate threats across cloud and on-premise data sources in a single, unified way – without moving data from its original source.
• Deep Partner Network: Builds on the QRadar ecosystem, one of the largest partner networks in the industry with more than 700 pre-built integrations.

Full Suite for Connected, Proactive Security Response
As part of QRadar Suite, the new cloud-native SIEM offers customers access to a wide set of integrated capabilities which can allow for more proactive detection, investigation and response across toolsets. With QRadar Suite, organizations can gain visibility into their exposed assets via attack surface management (ASM) capabilities, search for threats across toolsets, protect at the endpoint with EDR, and connect to automated playbooks to speed response (SOAR). QRadar SIEM empowers users with shared insights and automated actions across their core toolsets – accessed directly from their primary user interface, without needing to shift between tools.

Enterprise-Grade AI Speeds Response to Critical Threats
QRadar SIEM applies multiple layers of AI and automation to improve the quality of alerts and the efficiency of security analysts. These mature AI capabilities have been pre-trained on millions of alerts from IBM’s vast network of clients and are refined further post-deployment to account for each client’s unique environment. For example:

• Reduce Noise and Improve Alerts: Alert prioritization capabilities use AI to automatically de-prioritize low priority alerts, while automatically grouping, contextualizing and escalating high priority alerts – factoring in risk context from ongoing threat intelligence and analyst response patterns. This capability allowed IBM Consulting Cybersecurity Services to automate 85% of alert management for clients,³ and to accelerate their threat triage timelines by 55% in the first year of use.⁴
• Jump-Start Investigations: AI capability automatically runs federated searches across connected systems, generating a visual attack timeline, MITRE ATT&CK mappings, and recommended actions – giving analysts a significant head-start on investigation tasks.
• Automatically Update Detections: QRadar SIEM’s analytics are automatically updated with new detection rules and threat intelligence on an ongoing basis, to keep pace with evolving threats.

IBM’s AI security capabilities are embedded natively into the QRadar Suite analyst interface, bringing contextual insights to analysts’ fingertips and helping them take advantage of AI more intuitively within their regular workflows.

Generative AI to Advance SOC Productivity
IBM also plans to release generative AI (GAI) security capabilities for QRadar Suite in early 2024 – built on watsonx, the company’s AI and data platform. IBM is designing GAI to help optimize security teams’ time and talent by managing certain tedious tasks on behalf of analysts, while also making it easier for them to perform more challenging, higher value work. For example:

• Automate Reporting: Create simple summaries of security cases and incidents that can be shared with a variety of stakeholders in a single click.
• Accelerate Threat Hunting: Automatically generate searches to detect threats based on natural language descriptions of attack behaviour and patterns – helping to accelerate response to new threat campaigns.
• Interpret Machine-Generated Data: Helping analysts to quickly understand security log data by providing simple explanations of events that have taken place on a system – lowering technical barriers and expediting their investigations.
• Curate Threat Intelligence: Interpret and summarize highly relevant threat intelligence, honing in on campaigns that are more likely to affect clients based on their unique risk profile.

IBM is also developing predictive generative AI security capabilities which will be trained to create active responses that optimize over time – for instance, helping security team find similar incidents, update affected systems and patch vulnerable code.

Beyond these use-cases, IBM plans to embed generative AI across its broader security software and services portfolio. These capabilities will leverage watsonx infrastructure as well as watsonx AI models, which have been trained on curated, domain-specific datasets – designed to offer greater trust, transparency and accuracy.

For more about QRadar SIEM, visit information visit: https://www.ibm.com/products/qradar-cloud-native-siem

For more information about AI for Security, visit: https://www.ibm.com/security/artificial-intelligence

Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.

About IBM Security

IBM Security helps secure the world’s largest enterprises and governments with an integrated portfolio of security products and services, infused with dynamic AI and automation capabilities. The portfolio, supported by world-renowned IBM Security X-Force® research, enables organizations to predict threats, protect data as it moves, and respond with speed and precision without holding back business innovation. IBM is trusted by thousands of organizations as their partner to assess, strategize, implement, and manage security transformations. IBM operates one of the world’s broadest security research, development, and delivery organizations, monitors 150 billion+ security events per day in more than 130 countries, and has been granted more than 10,000 security patents worldwide.

OXFORDSHIRE, U.K., November 2, 2023  – The National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) today announces an agreement with IBM for the center to provide UK researchers with cloud access to IBM Quantum’s Premium Plan, including IBM’s fleet of quantum computing systems, with the aim to drive new research directions based on the use of quantum computing. Through this initiative, and by joining the IBM Quantum Network, the NQCC further spearheads their vision to enable the UK to solve some of the most complex and challenging problems facing society by harnessing the potential of quantum computing.

The NQCC is a co-sponsored program by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Its objective is to drive new research horizons by serving the UK academic, research, and public sector communities to enable proof-of-concept projects, feasibility studies and discovery-led science.

“Providing quantum computing access is an important step in contributing towards the national effort,” NQCC Director, Dr Michael Cuthbert said. “The agreement with IBM will enable the NQCC to provide utility-scale quantum computing resources for the UK’s vibrant research community, which will open up new avenues of fundamental and applied research, with the prospect of boosting the development of novel technologies and drive new discoveries.”

IBM Quantum offers users access to utility-scale processors with more than 100 qubits. These systems deliver performance capable of serving as scientific tools to explore an expanded scale of problems that classical systems may never be able to solve.

“Organizations that collaborate with the NQCC will have the opportunity to access quantum computers which, as shown in recently published research, are capable of accurately modeling a physical system in nature beyond leading classical approaches,” said Dr. Scott Crowder, Vice President, Adoption and Business Development, IBM Quantum. “This ‘quantum utility’ gives our users the ability to explore hard problems — and to begin extracting real value.”

Aligned with the recently published National Quantum Strategy and the commitment of £2.5 billion of investment, the NQCC as a national lab is committed to working with organizations across government, industry and the research community, to support the delivery of quantum computing capabilities for the UK and build the user community for quantum computing.

The center seeks to enable the UK to become a quantum-ready nation and take full advantage of the benefits that quantum computing can offer, by supporting the UK-based organizations. It will help to boost access to quantum computing resources for UK-based users and further catalyze its SparQ user engagement program enabling the user journey from awareness to advocacy.

NQCC’s mission complements STFC’s other long-term partnership with IBM: the Hartree National Centre for Digital Innovation programme, which applies AI, data science, high performance computing (HPC), and quantum computing for the benefit UK industry and the public sector.

Where NQCC’s mission is to enable the UK to solve some of the most complex and challenging problems facing society by harnessing the potential of quantum computing, the Hartree Centre and IBM aim to help UK organizations to develop and adopt innovative solutions from the core technologies and apply them to challenges in areas including engineering, materials development, life sciences, energy and environment.

There are, therefore, many opportunities for both centers, the NQCC and the Hartree Centre, to collaborate and support UK industry at different stages of the adoption and innovation journey to fully prepare and futureproof the UK economy to gain maximum benefit from quantum computing.

About the NQCC

The NQCC is a new research institution funded through UKRI, which is dedicated to accelerating the development of quantum computing by addressing the challenges of scalability. Working with partners across industry, government and the research community, the NQCC is creating the necessary R&D capabilities through co-ordination and delivery of a technical programme, alongside the commissioning and operation of new facilities. The programme will deliver assured quantum computing capability, enabling the UK to remain internationally competitive. The centre will be headquartered in a purpose-built facility at the STFC’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Campus in Oxfordshire, which is due for completion in 2024.

About IBM

IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. More than 4,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.

ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 31, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) introduced the new IBM Storage Scale System 6000, a cloud-scale global data platform designed to meet today’s data intensive and AI workload demands, and the latest offering in the IBM Storage for Data and AI portfolio.

For the seventh consecutive year and counting, IBM is a 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage Leader, recognized for its vision and execution.¹ The new IBM Storage Scale System 6000 seeks to build on IBM’s leadership position with an enhanced high performance parallel file system designed for data intensive use-cases. It provides up to 7M IOPs and up to 256GB/s throughput for read only workloads per system in a 4U (four rack units) footprint.²

To leverage the economic value of both foundation and traditional AI models, businesses must focus on the data – their current capacity and growth forecasts, where the data resides, how it’s secured and accessed, and how to optimize future data storage investments.

“The potential of today’s new era of AI can only be fully realized, in my opinion, if organizations have a strategy to unify data from multiple sources in near real-time without creating numerous copies of data and going through constant iterations of data ingest,” said Denis Kennelly, general manager, IBM Storage. “IBM Storage Scale System 6000 gives clients the ability to do just that – brings together data from core, edge, and cloud into a single platform with optimized performance for GPU workloads.”

The IBM Storage Scale System 6000 is optimized for storing semi-structured and unstructured data including video, imagery, text, instrumentation data, etc., that is generated daily and accelerates an organization’s digital footprint across hybrid environments. With the IBM Storage Scale System clients can:

Expect greater data efficiencies and economies of scale with the addition of IBM FlashCore Modules (FCM), to be incorporated in 1H 2024:

• New maximum capacity NVMe FCM will provide capacity efficiency with 70% lower cost and 53% less energy per TB vs. IBM’s previous maximum capacity flash drives for IBM Storage Scale System.³ This can help clients realize the full performance of NVMe with the cost advantages of Quad-level Cell (QLC).⁴
• Powerful inline hardware-accelerated data compression and encryption to help keep client data secured even in multi-user, multi-tenant environments.
• Storage Scale System 6000 with FCM will support 2.5x the amount of data in the same floor space than the previous generation system.⁵

Accelerate the adoption and operationalization of AI workloads with IBM watsonx:

• Engineered with a new NVMeoF turbo tier, new parallel multi-tenant data isolation and IBM patented computational storage drives, this is designed to provide more performance security and efficiency for AI workloads.
• Storage Scale software, the global data platform for unstructured data that powers the Scale System 6000, connects data with an open ecosystem of multi-vendor storage options including AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud and other public clouds, in addition to IBM Storage Tape.

Gain faster access to data with over 2.5x the GB/s throughput and 2x IOPs performance of market leading competitors⁶:

• High-processing throughput and access speed with multiple concurrent AI and data-intensive workloads that can be run to meet a range of use cases.

The Benefits of IBM Storage Scale in Applied AI at the University of Queensland

The University of Queensland (UQ) is a world-class research institution that has significantly accelerated a wide range of workloads providing faster access to data and improved efficiency and capabilities using the IBM Storage Scale global data platform and IBM Storage Scale System. Examples of some of the research where IBM Storage is used include applied AI for the characterization of neurodegenerative diseases and in the search for more effective and flexible vaccine technologies.

“With our current Storage Scale Systems 3500, we are helping decrease time to discovery and increase research productivity for a growing variety of scientific disciplines. For AI research involving medical image analysis, we have decreased latency of access by as much as 60% compared to our previous storage infrastructure. For genomics and complex fluid dynamics workloads, we have increased throughput by as much as 70%,” said Jake Carroll, Chief Technology Officer, Research Computing Centre, The University of Queensland, Australia. “We get all the benefits of a high-speed parallel file system inside our supercomputing resources with the data management transparency and global data access that the IBM Storage Scale software provides.”

Carroll added, “IBM’s Storage Scale System 6000 should be a gamechanger for us. With the specs that I’ve seen, by doubling the performance and increasing the efficiency, we would be able to ask our scientific research questions with higher throughput, but with a lower TCO and lower power consumption per IOP, in the process.”

Accelerating AI with the IBM Storage Scale System and NVIDIA Technology

The Storage Scale System 6000 has the ability to create an information supply chain from an NVIDIA AI solution to other AI workloads independent of where they are located. IBM’s new NVMeoF turbo tier has been engineered for small files like those collected from remote devices or to provide access to smaller transactions like data lake or lakehouse analytics so they can be integrated into an NVIDIA solution.

The Storage Scale System 6000 supports NVIDIA Magnum IOTM GPUDirect® Storage (GDS) with a direct path between GPU memory and storage. It has also been designed to increase performance with data movement IO when GDS is enabled. Utilizing NVIDIA ConnectX-7™ NICs, the Scale System 6000 supports up to 16 ports of 100Gb RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), 200Gb/s and/or 400Gb/s InfiniBand, or a combination of both to increase performance between nodes or directly to NVIDIA GPUs. To learn more about how IBM Storage can accelerate access and provide a global data platform with NVIDIA AI solutions, visit https://www.ibm.com/storage/nvidia.

Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.

NEW YORK and ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 24, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) and KPMG LLP announced they are expanding their alliance to help enable business transformations for clients implementing SAP S/4HANA^® across the energy and utilities industry. Cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects run the potential risk of failing without the right technology in place and the right business expertise to fully integrate it. IBM Consulting and KPMG together are bringing a breadth of consulting, operations, tax, risk and finance experience to the ERP implementation process to help energy and utilities companies automate and manage core business processes for optimal performance.

IBM Consulting is a global leader in SAP transformations, delivering cohesive collaborative solutions based on in-depth industry experience, AI, and hybrid multi cloud deployment. IBM has well-established technology and deep experience within a broad partner ecosystem, including a 50-year history partnering with SAP. KPMG brings business-led, SAP-enabled functional transformation experience in more than 25 countries while leveraging deep energy and utility industry knowledge to deliver business value.

“As companies across industries accelerate the shift to cloud and contemplate the move to SAP S/4HANA, they will need the support from trusted experts to help achieve success in any transformation project,” said Bill Piotrowski, Americas SAP Leader for IBM Consulting. “We’re excited to partner with KPMG to provide Energy & Utilities clients access to industry insights that will help them capitalize on their SAP investment supported by experience in supporting numerous SAP S/4HANA transformations worldwide.”

KPMG and IBM Consulting bring complementary skillsets across SAP technology implementation, cross-sector business processes, regulatory, risk, finance, and tax considerations, and operational issues. The combination of the firms’ skills and experience can strengthen outcomes for the benefit of clients, and successful enterprise resource planning transformation across the energy and utilities sector.

“Identifying the potential value created by financial considerations up front in the planning of an ERP implementation can significantly improve the likelihood of success,” said Brad Stansberry, Energy & Chemical Industry Advisory Leader at KPMG. “Working with IBM Consulting and the business and technical expertise they bring will expand our ability to help our joint clients accelerate productivity and unlock growth opportunities.”

Together, KPMG and IBM have already delivered a comprehensive business transformation program at Liberty Utilities, a leading provider of local utility management, service and support across the United States and Canada. The four-year program builds on Liberty’s “Customer First” project to revolutionize the company’s Customer, Finance, Asset Management, Field Services, and Supply Chain Operations.

“IBM Consulting has been our trusted partner, and we continue our collaboration to accelerate our remarkable transformation journey,” said Jody Allison, Vice President, Transformation at Liberty Utilities. “IBM’s unique relationship with KPMG brings valued finance and advisory expertise which will help extend our ‘Customer First’ platform into every aspect of our organization, allowing us to deliver to our customer’s expectations, enable our employees to serve, and facilitate growth as we will be able to easily integrate acquired businesses and assets in the future.”

IBM Consulting helps accelerate business transformation for our clients through hybrid cloud and AI technologies, leveraging our open ecosystem of partners. With deep industry and business expertise spanning strategy, experience design, technology, and operations, we have become a trusted partner to the world’s most innovative and valuable companies, helping them modernize and secure their most complex systems. Our 160,000 consultants embrace an open way of working and apply our proven co-creation method, IBM Garage, to scale ideas into outcomes. As the only major global systems integrator inside a technology company, we don’t just advise — we invent and build what’s next together with our clients. Find out more at IBM.com/consulting.

Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.

About IBM

IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. More than 4,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to effect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.

Visit www.ibm.com for more information.

About KPMG LLP

KPMG LLP is the U.S. firm of the KPMG global organization of independent professional services firms providing audit, tax and advisory services. The KPMG global organization operates in 144 countries and territories and has more than 236,000 people working in member firms around the world. Each KPMG firm is a legally distinct and separate entity and describes itself as such. KPMG International Limited is a private English company limited by guarantee. KPMG International Limited and its related entities do not provide services to clients.

KPMG is widely recognized for being a great place to work and build a career. Our people share a sense of purpose in the work we do, and a strong commitment to community service, inclusion and diversity, and eradicating childhood illiteracy.

ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 5, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled the next evolution of its managed detection and response service offerings with new AI technologies, including the ability to automatically escalate or close up to 85% of alerts,¹  helping to accelerate security response timelines for clients.

The new Threat Detection and Response Services (TDR) provide 24×7 monitoring, investigation, and automated remediation of security alerts from all relevant technologies across client’s hybrid cloud environments – including existing security tools and investments, as well as cloud, on-premise, and operational technologies (OT). The managed services are delivered by IBM Consulting’s global team of security analysts via IBM’s advanced security services platform, which applies multiple layers of AI and contextual threat intelligence from the company’s vast global security network – helping automate away the noise while quickly escalating critical threats.

“Security teams today are not just outnumbered by attackers, but also by the number of vulnerabilities, alerts and security tools and systems they’re tasked with managing on a day-to-day basis,” said Chris McCurdy, General Manager, Worldwide IBM Consulting Cybersecurity Services. “By combining advanced analytics and real-time threat intelligence with human expertise, IBM’s new Threat Detection and Response Services can augment organization’s security defenses with a capability that is scalable, continuously improving and strong enough for tomorrow’s threats.”

Intelligently Adapting Threat Defenses
The new TDR Services are underpinned by a set of AI-powered security technologies that support thousands of clients across the world, monitoring billions of potential security events per day. It leverages AI models that continuously learn from real-world client data, including security analyst responses, engineered to automatically close low priority and false positive alerts based on a client-defined confidence level. This capability also automatically escalates high risk alerts that require immediate action by security teams and provides investigation context.

IBM’s TDR Services are designed to provide:

• Crowdsourced detection rules, Optimized alerts. Leveraging real-time insights from IBM’s threat management engagements, the new services use AI to continuously assess and auto-recommend the most effective detection rules – helping to improve alert quality, and speed response times. This capability helped reduce low-value SIEM alerts by 45% and auto escalate 79% more high-value alerts that required immediate attention². Organizations can approve and update detection rules with just two clicks through its co-managed portal.
• MITRE ATT&CK assessment. To stay prepared for ransomware and wipe-out attacks, organizations will be able to see how their environment is covering MITRE ATT&CK framework tactics, techniques, and procedures as compared to their industry and geography peers. By applying AI, the new services are designed to reconcile the multiple detection tools and policies currently in place at an organization, providing an enterprise view into how to best detect threats and assess gaps to update within an ATT&CK framework.
• Seamless end-to-end integration. With its open API approach, the new services can quickly integrate with a client’s enterprise-wide security assets, whether on premise or in the cloud. Organizations can continue to access their ecosystem while also having the option to connect and collaborate and define their own response playbooks through a co-managed portal. This provides a unified enterprise view, precise remediation capabilities, and consistently enforces security policies across IT & OT.
• 24×7 global support. Organizations will have access to more than 6,000 IBM Cybersecurity Services professionals across the globe 24/7 x 365 to help augment security programs. IBM Consulting Cybersecurity Services’ vast global network serves more than 3,000 clients around the world – managing more than 2 million endpoints and 150 billion security events per day.

“Security leaders today are trying to escape the vicious cycle of staff shortages, increased threats, and rising demands from the C-Suite to mature their cyber program without breaking the bank. For many organizations the old playbook of swapping out their tools for a vendor’s preferred platform does not work, as they cannot afford to write off prior SOC investments,” said Craig Robinson, IDC Research VP of Security Services. “A service like IBM’s Threat Detection and Response offering can provide an off-ramp to these concerns, without requiring a full rip-and-replace of their prior security investments and help shift their human capital in the SOC to more of a proactive mode.”

To support continuous improvement for security operations capabilities, IBM’s TDR Services, which are now available, include access to IBM’s X- Force Incident Response Services along with the option to include additional proactive security services from IBM X-Force, such as penetration testing, adversary simulation or vulnerability management. X-Force will also provide guidance to help clients improve their security operations over time, based on the current threat landscape, clients’ evolving IT environment, and insights gleaned from engagements with thousands of IBM Cybersecurity Services clients around the world.

Additional Sources

• For more information on IBM TDR Services please visit https://www.ibm.com/services/threat-detection-response.
• Sign up for a webinar to learn more about the new TDR Services and the challenges of having a piecemeal approach to detection and response on Wednesday, November 1, 2023, at 11:00 a.m. ET here.

About IBM Security
IBM Security helps secure the world’s largest enterprises and governments with an integrated portfolio of security products and services, infused with dynamic AI and automation capabilities. The portfolio, supported by world-renowned IBM Security X-Force® research, enables organizations to predict threats, protect data as it moves, and respond with speed and precision without holding back business innovation. IBM is trusted by thousands of organizations as their partner to assess, strategize, implement, and manage security transformations. IBM operates one of the world’s broadest security research, development, and delivery organizations, monitors 150 billion+ security events per day in more than 130 countries, and has been granted more than 10,000 security patents worldwide.

¹ Based on IBM’s internal analysis of aggregated performance data observed from engagements with 340+ clients in July 2023. Up to 85% of alerts were handled through automation rather than human intervention, using AI capabilities that are part of IBM’s Threat Detection and Response service. Actual results will vary based on client configurations and conditions and, therefore, generally expected results cannot be provided.

² Based on IBM’s analysis of aggregated annual performance data observed in 2022 from engagements with 150+ Managed SIEM clients. Actual results will vary based on client configurations and conditions and, therefore, generally expected results cannot be provided.

ARMONK, N.Y., Aug. 24, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — IBM  and open-source AI platform Hugging Face, today announced that IBM is participating in the $235M series D funding round of Hugging Face. The additional funding will further strengthen Hugging Face’s position as the leading open-source and open science artificial intelligence platform.

IBM and Hugging Face recently announced a collaboration on watsonx, IBM’s generative AI platform, to help enterprises build, deploy and customize foundation models across multiple domains. Within watsonx, AI builders can leverage models from IBM and the Hugging Face community, which are pre-trained to support a range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks including question answering, content generation and summarization, text classification and extraction.

IBM has contributed over 200 open models and datasets on Hugging Face, including the recent release of the Geospatial Foundation Model in partnership with NASA. It is the largest geospatial foundation model on Hugging Face and the first-ever open-source AI foundation model built in collaboration with NASA. IBM also plans to host Meta’s Llama 2-chat 70 billion parameter model within watsonx, furthering the company’s strategy of leveraging both third-party and its own AI models to maintain open innovation.

About IBM
IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs, and gain the competitive edge in their industries. More than 4,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently, and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity, and service.

Visit www.ibm.com for more information.

ARMONK, N.Y. and HAMILTON, Bermuda, Aug. 24, 2023 – IBM and FGH Parent, L.P.,  (together with its subsidiaries, “Fortitude Re”), today announced they have entered into a $450 million agreement to transform Fortitude Re’s  life insurance policy servicing operations with the implementation of AI technology and other automation tools designed to deliver a best-in-class customer experience for policyholders and insurers.

Fortitude Re selected IBM’s subsidiary, IBM Insurance Solutions, Inc. to leverage IBM’s global capabilities to provide insurance third-party administration (TPA) services on its behalf for over four million policyholders. IBM will design and manage a custom, streamlined solution for administering life and annuity insurance policies that will help Fortitude Re bolster its third-party administration operations and further enhance its commitment to customer-centric service for policyholders and insurer clients, while helping to capture operational expense reductions.

Fortitude Re’s collaboration with IBM reinforces its commitment to providing policy administration services as a valuable option in its reinsurance offerings, underscoring Fortitude Re’s unique ability to provide holistic reinsurance solutions, inclusive of policy administration and related operational capabilities.

IBM will support Fortitude Re in delivering end-to-end process optimization of their insurance customer service operations, providing flexibility and scalability to capitalize on new business growth opportunities with an open ecosystem approach. IBM Consulting will lead these efforts, which will include AI for automation, hybrid cloud and main-frame-as-a service technology.

“Combining Fortitude Re’s deep industry expertise with IBM’s technology leadership will enable us to deliver effective and efficient administration solutions as part of our bespoke solution design for our Life & Annuity customers,” said Sean Coyle, Fortitude Re Chief Operating Officer. “By partnering with IBM, Fortitude Re will be able to leverage AI technology, automation, and the latest in advanced data analytics to help continue delivering a high-quality service experience for the millions of insurance customers we service, all while reducing  operational risk, improving efficiencies, and increasing our analytic capabilities.”

“We are excited about our latest collaboration with Fortitude Re to provide third-party administration for insurance and annuity policies. The insurance industry continues to be an important focus for IBM with significant opportunity to apply our industry expertise and technologies to solve complex challenges facing insurers,” said Vijay Vijayasankar, Managing Partner Financial Services at IBM Consulting. “We are committed to working hand-in-hand with Fortitude Re to enhance security and customer experience while also pursuing growth and efficiency.”

About IBM

IBM is a leading provider of enterprise AI, hybrid cloud architecture, security and ESG insights to the global financial services sector. Its deep industry expertise, extensive portfolio of services and solutions, and its robust ecosystem of fintech partners, empower collaboration, innovation, and creation with clients. As a trusted partner to banks, insurers, capital markets and payments providers, IBM guides financial institutions on all stages of their digital transformation journeys through IBM Consulting and delivers the proven infrastructure, software and services they need through IBM Technology. For more information, visit www.ibm.com/industries/financial-services.

About Fortitude Re

The Fortitude Re Group manages approximately $72 billion in general and separate account insurance reserves and administers over 4.5 million insurance policies.  The foundations of our business model are our exceptional insurance professionals and the support of the world’s most sophisticated insurance investors, including Carlyle and T&D Insurance Group.  Our people, our capital strength and our capabilities drive strategic reinsurance solutions designed to meet our clients’ highest priority goals and to create sustainable, long-term value for our shareholders, our teammates and the communities in which we operate.  For more information visit, www.fortitude-re.com and follow Fortitude Re on LinkedIn.

This press release may contain forward-looking statements or statements of future expectations based on currently available information. Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Accordingly, there are or will be important factors that could cause actual outcomes or results to differ materially from those indicated in these statements. This press release does not make any representation or warranty, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness or updated status (whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise) of statements herein.  In no event will IBM or Fortitude Re or their affiliate companies be liable to anyone for any decision made or action taken in conjunction with the information and/or statements in this press release or for any related damages.

ARMONK, N.Y., Aug. 22, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — IBM today announced watsonx Code Assistant for Z, a new generative AI-assisted product that will help enable faster translation of COBOL to Java on IBM Z and enhances developer productivity on the platform. This product will be generally available in Q4 2023, and is being designed to help accelerate COBOL application modernization. Watsonx Code Assistant for Z will preview during TechXchange, IBM’s premier technical learning event in Las Vegas, Sept 11-13.

Watsonx Code Assistant for Z is a new addition to the watsonx Code Assistant product family, along with IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed, scheduled for release later this year. These solutions will be powered by IBM’s watsonx.ai code model, which will have knowledge of 115 coding languages¹ having learned from 1.5 trillion tokens.² At 20 billion parameters, it is on target to become one of the largest generative AI foundation models for code automation.³ The watsonx Code Assistant product portfolio will extend over time to address other programming languages, to improve time to value for modernization and address growing skills challenges for developers.

Watsonx Code Assistant for Z is being designed to assist businesses in leveraging generative AI and automated tooling to accelerate their mainframe application modernization – all with the goal of preserving the performance, security and resiliency capabilities of IBM Z.

The COBOL data processing language supports many vital business and operational processes at organizations globally. At scale, using watsonx Code Assistant for Z in comparison to other approaches could make it easier for developers to selectively and incrementally transform COBOL business services into well architected high-quality Java code – with estimated billions of lines of COBOL code as potential candidates for targeted modernization over time. Generative AI can help developers to more quickly assess, update, validate and test the right code, allowing them to more efficiently modernize large applications and focus on higher impact tasks.

IBM is designing these capabilities to provide tooling for each step of the modernization journey. The solution is expected to include IBM’s Application Discovery and Delivery Intelligence (ADDI) inventory and analysis tool. Following ADDI, key steps on the journey include refactoring business services in COBOL, transforming COBOL code to Java code with an optimized design, and validating the resulting outcome, including using automated testing capabilities. Potential benefits for clients include:

• Accelerating code development and increasing developer productivity throughout the application modernization lifecycle
• Managing total cost, complexity, and risk of application modernization initiatives, including translation and optimization of code in-place on IBM Z
• Expanding access to a broader pool of IT skills and accelerating developer onboarding
• Achieving high quality, easy to maintain code through model customization and the application of best practices

“Our collaboration with IBM is an important element in our drive to leverage generative AI interfaces to challenge legacy approaches with material productivity gains, and reinvent our Capital Markets solutions,” said Roger Burkhardt, CTO, Capital Markets and AI, Broadridge Financial. “We have had excellent client response to our generative AI investments and we are intrigued by the opportunity to further our efforts by leveraging IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z to address a broader range of platforms.”

AI-assisted mainframe application modernization is an imperative

According to new research from the IBM Institute for Business Value, organizations are 12x more likely to leverage existing mainframe assets rather than rebuild their application estates from scratch in the next two years. At the same time, however, the study shows that the number one challenge for those same organizations is a lack of resources and skills.

“By bringing generative AI capabilities through watsonx to new use cases, we plan to drive real progress for our clients,” said Kareem Yusuf, PhD, Senior Vice President, Product Management and Growth, IBM Software. “IBM is engineering watsonx Code Assistant for Z to take a targeted and optimized approach. It’s built to rapidly and accurately convert code optimized for IBM Z, accelerate time to market and broaden the skills pool. This can help enhance applications and add new capabilities while preserving the performance, resiliency, and security inherent in IBM Z.”

There are many application modernization approaches available today. Some options include rewriting all application code in Java, or migrating everything to public cloud, which may sacrifice capabilities that are core to the IBM Z value proposition while failing to deliver on expected cost reduction. Tools that convert COBOL applications to Java syntax can produce code that is hard to maintain and can be unrecognizable to a Java developer. Generative AI is promising, but current AI-assisted partial re-write technology lacks COBOL support and doesn’t optimize the resulting Java code for the given task.

The resulting Java code from watsonx Code Assistant for Z will be object-oriented. IBM is designing this solution to be optimized to interoperate with the rest of the COBOL application, with CICS, IMS, DB2, and other z/OS runtimes. Java on Z is designed to be performance-optimized versus a compared x86 platform.⁴

Building on a foundation of governance and innovation

According to a 2023 Gartner^® report (For Gartner Subscribers only), “by 2028, the combination of humans and AI assistants working in tandem could reduce the time to complete coding tasks by 30%.” The report further states that “the use of AI code generation tools is not replacing the quality assurance (QA) processes and security controls that are needed by developers for robust and secure product development, as well as for mitigation of inherited risks from using generative methods for code.”⁵

Protecting sensitive data and customer intellectual property are critical when it comes to implementing generative AI. IBM for decades has followed core principles, grounded in commitments to Trust and Transparency. With this principle-based approach, the watsonx platform aims to enable enterprises to leverage their own trusted data and IP to build tailored AI solutions that are scalable across operations.

Additionally, IBM Consulting brings deep domain expertise in IBM Z application modernization with a focus on guiding clients that leverage the platform across key industries such as banking, insurance, healthcare and government. These dedicated consultants can help clients identify the right application areas to modernize in order to optimize the potential benefits of watsonx Code Assistant for Z.

IBM’s plans, directions, and intentions may change or be withdrawn at any time at IBM’s discretion without notice. Information about potential future products and improvements is provided to give a general idea of IBM’s goals and objectives and should not be used in making a purchase decision. IBM is not obligated to provide any material, code, or functionality based on this information.

⁵ Gartner, Emerging Tech: Generative AI Code Assistants Are Becoming Essential to Developer Experience, By Radu Miclaus, Arun Chandrasekaran, Ray Valdes, Mark Driver, Eric Goodness, Published 11 May 2023

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

About IBM
IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. More than 4,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.