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.
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.
ARMONK, N.Y., Aug. 17, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Today, IBM is expanding its collaboration with Microsoft to help joint clients accelerate the deployment of generative AI – and deliver a new offering that will provide clients with the expertise and technology they need to innovate their business processes and scale generative AI effectively.
With today’s news, IBM Consulting, in collaboration with Microsoft, will focus on helping clients to implement and scale Azure OpenAI Service. The new IBM Consulting Azure OpenAI Service offering, which is available on Azure Marketplace, is a fully managed AI service that allows developers and data scientists to apply powerful large language models, including their GPT and Codex series. It aims to help businesses define an adoption strategy and an initial set of specific and value-add generative AI use cases.
In addition to the new offering, IBM and Microsoft have been collaborating around AI, leveraging IBM Consulting skills and Azure OpenAI Service to create potential solutions and address specific use cases, including:
Procurement and source to pay: Together the companies are offering a solution that combines Microsoft Power Platform and Azure OpenAI Service to help businesses automate the highly manual and fragmented sourcing and procurement process as well as drive new insights about their supply chain. The solution is designed to improve operational efficiency, save time, and generate new actionable insights for users.
Summarization and content generation: Financial institutions and banks are exploring how generative AI can accelerate the development of personalized content for their customers through summarization. For example, IBM Consulting and Microsoft worked on a use case in a hackathon with Julius Baer Group to efficiently process and summarize financial reports while automatically creating an audio version of the report.
Streamline healthcare processes: IBM Consulting is leveraging Azure OpenAI Service to offer a solution that is designed to automatically ingest and analyze complex medical records and policy documents to help automate the prior authorization process. In addition, it is built to provide nurses and doctors with a virtual assistant to help collect information from patient records. The solution aims to help decrease the time needed to process prior authorization requests, reducing administrative burdens and improving the clinician experience.
Enterprise search and knowledge base: For many organizations the information employees need to do their jobs is dispersed and siloed. Working together, IBM Consulting and Microsoft helped Wintershall Dea implement a knowledge extraction tool designed for information retrieval within vast knowledge bases. By integrating OCR and Microsoft Azure OpenAI, a user-friendly tool is created that eliminates the need for manual browsing, allowing users to effortlessly search for valuable insights.
“Businesses are looking for responsible ways to adopt and integrate multi-model generative AI solutions that augment the work their teams are doing in areas such as creative content and code creation, content summarization and search,” said Francesco Brenna, Global VP & Senior Partner, Microsoft Practice at IBM Consulting. “Our work with Microsoft is another example of IBM’s open ecosystem model designed to bring value to clients while helping them responsibly build and scale generative AI across their businesses.”
As part of the new solution, enterprise customers will also have access to IBM Consulting experts, including 21,000 data, AI and experience consultants, who can help them effectively implement generative AI models to advance their business transformation.
An open ecosystem approach to AI
IBM Consulting takes an open and collaborative approach to plan, build, implement and operate generative AI solutions that embrace multiple models on multiple clouds from industry leaders. An open ecosystem approach helps clients define the right models and the right architecture to deliver the desired outcomes. As part of this open approach, IBM Consulting works with clients across industries to assess their generative AI readiness, define the right strategies for their business and help them implement and responsibly govern generative AI in production.
Getting to enterprise AI at scale requires a human-centric, principled approach, and IBM Consulting helps clients establish guardrails that align with the organization’s values and standards, mitigates bias and manages data security, lineage and provenance.
Proven work, expertise and partnership momentum
To help clients prepare data to fuel their generative AI models, select IBM AI technology is currently available on the Azure Marketplace and can be deployed on Azure. Together we’re enabling clients to accelerate the impact of generative AI using their trusted data.
This work builds on recent momentum with IBM and Microsoft to help clients transform their businesses. IBM Consulting, which has a dedicated global practice focused on Azure Data and AI, has focused on training its consultants, who now have over 40,000 Azure certifications. Additionally, IBM Consulting brings expertise and capabilities to help Microsoft clients through its acquisition of Neudesic, which specializes primarily in Microsoft Azure.
IBM Consulting and Neudesic together were also recognized with Microsoft’s 2023 Partner of the Year Award in 13 categories. IBM Consulting is this year’s U.S. Partner of the Year Winner for GSI Growth Champion, which distinguishes IBM as the partner that’s demonstrated the most significant growth – a partner that best offers solutions aligned with Microsoft’s in driving digital innovation and cloud transformation for our joint customers in the U.S.
“Together, Microsoft and IBM are collaborating to deliver innovative solutions, that will help customers responsibly accelerate deployment of generative AI,” said Dinis Couto, GM Global Partner Solutions, Microsoft. “As a leader in the delivery of generative AI and data solutions, we believe that partners like IBM are critical to enabling customers successful use of generative AI to advance business transformation.”
IBM Consulting’s AI Capabilities
IBM Consulting recently announced its Center of Excellence for generative AI, which includes more than 1,000 consultants with specialized generative AI expertise ready to help accelerate its clients’ business transformations with enterprise-grade AI, including technology from Microsoft, IBM and other ecosystem partners.
The Center of Excellence stands alongside IBM Consulting’s existing global AI and Automation practice and leverages proven methods like the IBM Garage for Generative AI, where IBM consultants apply a comprehensive, collaborative method to help clients fast-track innovation in the emerging category of foundation models for generative AI. That includes rapid use case ideation and prioritization, an open, multi-model approach to selecting architectures and training, as well as fine tuning and scaling models to unique business needs.
IBM Consulting accelerates business transformation for our clients through hybrid cloud and AI technologies, leveraging our open ecosystem of partners. With deep industry expertise spanning strategy, experience design, technology, and operations, we have become the trusted partner to many of the world’s most innovative and valuable companies, helping 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.
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 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.
ARMONK, N.Y., Aug. 15, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — IBM and the United States Tennis Association (USTA) today announced digital fan features to appear on USOpen.org and the US Open app, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated spoken commentary. Designed to give fans a more insightful and engaging experience when catching up on key moments from the tournament, IBM watsonx powered AI Commentary utilizes models built, trained, and deployed with watsonx, IBM’s AI and data platform. Throughout the entire tournament, AI technology will automate the production of detailed audio narration and captions to accompany US Open highlight videos at unprecedented scale – for every match in the singles draw, across all seventeen courts.
To implement the IBM watsonx powered AI Commentary, experts from IBM iX, the experience design partner within IBM Consulting, worked with the USTA to leverage foundation models within watsonx to build and train AI models in the unique language of tennis. Operating across a hybrid cloud infrastructure enabled by Red Hat OpenShift, generative AI built on these foundation models was applied to produce commentary with varied sentence structure and vocabulary to make the clips informative and engaging.
“Fans accessing the US Open digital experiences this year will be able to experience every singles match, across all seventeen courts, with detailed audio narration and captions accompanying each video – thanks to the power of IBM’s watsonx generative AI, specifically trained on the language of tennis,” said Jonathan Adashek, Senior Vice President of Communications and Marketing at IBM. “The AI Commentary feature was developed based on the watsonx enterprise-ready data and AI platform, designed to enable businesses to accelerate generative AI work by leveraging foundation models and machine learning in one place, with their own data.”
Also new at this year’s US Open, the IBM watsonx powered AI Draw Analysis is a first-of-its-kind tennis statistic for the US Open that utilizes both structured and unstructured data from IBM Power Index & Likelihood to Win to project the level of advantage or disadvantage of all players in the singles draw. Each player will receive an IBM AI Draw Analysis at the start of the tournament, which will be updated daily as the tournament progresses and players are eliminated. Every draw is ranked, allowing fans to click into individual matches and see the projected difficulty of their draw and potential opponents.
“Delivering a digital fan experience that showcases every key moment and storyline from the US Open is always our top priority, and IBM’s development leadership continually enables our fans to connect with the US Open in deeper ways every year,” said Brian Ryerson, Senior Director, Digital Strategy, USTA. “We’re particularly excited this year for fans to experience IBM’s AI commentary with watsonx for all Singles Highlights, providing deeper insights into our video highlights than ever before. Additionally, with the watsonx powered AI Draw Analysis fans can easily visualize each player’s potential opponents and highlight their complete path to the finals allowing greater insight into each round’s potential match ups.”
IBM has been the official technology partner of the USTA for more than 30 years. The introduction of these new fan features showcase how they continue to co-create world-class digital experiences that bring the drama and excitement of the US Open to more than 12 million people around the world each year. The watsonx powered AI Commentary and AI Draw Analysis join an already expansive suite of digital fan features including the IBM Power Index, Match Insights, and Likelihood to Win. The US Open’s digital experiences are run on the USTA’s flexible, open hybrid cloud platform, which integrates technology from dozens of partners, automates key business processes, and secures the entire world-class digital experience of the US Open.
The 2023 US Open, including its Fan Week, during which the Qualifying tournament is held, runs from August 22 through September 10.
To see IBMs technology in action,including generative AI Commentary and the daily updated IBM Draw Analysis, visit USOpen.org or on your mobile device via the USOpen app, available in the Apple and Android app stores.
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. Nearly 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 business services 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. For more information, visit www.ibm.com.
About USTA
The USTA is the national governing body for the sport of tennis in the U.S. and the leader in promoting and developing the growth of tennis at every level — from local communities to the highest level of the professional game. A not-for-profit organization, it invests 100% of its proceeds in growing the game. It owns and operates the US Open, one of the highest-attended annual sporting events in the world, and launched the US Open Series, linking summer WTA and ATP World Tour tournaments to the US Open. In addition, it owns approximately 120 Pro Circuit events throughout the U.S. and selects the teams for the Davis Cup, Billie Jean King Cup, Olympic and Paralympic Games. The USTA’s philanthropic entity, the USTA Foundation, provides grants and scholarships in addition to supporting tennis and education programs nationwide to benefit under-resourced youth through the National Junior Tennis & Learning (NJTL) network. For more information about the USTA, go to USTA.com or follow the official accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X) and TikTok.
ARMONK, N.Y., Aug. 10, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — IBM today announced it has completed its acquisition of Apptio Inc. after receiving all required regulatory approvals. The acquisition gives clients the ability to derive additional value through the powerful combination of Apptio and IBM.
Technology is a competitive differentiator for today’s enterprises. Organizations are accelerating their IT investments, spreading workloads and applications across public and private clouds, using multiple service providers. As a result, their expenses are increasing, and they need simplified, integrated, and automated solutions to optimize their IT spend, improve operations, and drive greater financial returns.
Today’s close brings together the industry-leading solutions of Apptio’s FinOps offerings, including ApptioOne, Cloudability and Targetprocess, and IBM’s automation portfolio of Turbonomic, AIOps and Instana to give clients a “virtual command center” for managing, optimizing and automating technology spending decisions.
With AI and foundation models top of mind for clients and partners, IBM will also augment its watsonx AI and data platform with Apptio’s $450 billion in anonymized IT spend data, unlocking new innovation, insight and value.
“The combination of Apptio products and IBM’s IT automation portfolio will give businesses a 360-degree technology management platform they can use to optimize and automate decisions across their IT landscapes,” said Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President, Software and Chief Commercial Officer, IBM. “We are bringing together market-leading and best-in-class solutions to continue to reshape IT from a cost center to a true competitive advantage, powered by automation and AI.”
Starting immediately, clients can leverage the early integration between Apptio and IBM through their Cloudability and Turbonomic offerings. This is an important first step as IBM looks to drive significant synergy across several key growth areas, including automation, Red Hat, IBM Consulting, and IBM’s broader AI portfolio.
Cloudability gives organizations the data, insights and recommendations needed to understand and eliminate waste from their cloud spend, while Turbonomic generates trustworthy optimization decisions that can be automated to unlock true cloud elasticity, getting rid of overprovisioning to protect performance. Together, these products can give clients full coverage for the “Inform,” “Optimize” and “Operate” stages of the FinOps Framework, providing what they need to control cloud spend without slowing innovation or negatively impacting operational performance.
Cloudability can ingest Turbonomic executed and proposed actions to provide a shared, single view across services that helps stakeholders understand the impact that has been, and can be, achieved by bringing these two leading IT automation offerings together.
Clients are already seeing the benefits of these solutions. With Cloudability, organizations can reduce cloud costs by 30% or more1 while allocating 100% of cloud program costs2 and increasing reservation coverage to over 90%3. With Turbonomic, they can improve cloud investments by 33% and get 30% of engineering time back.4
The close of the Apptio acquisition is one of a series of investments in IT Automation by IBM over the last three years to help solve the problems facing today’s IT and business leaders. In 2020, IBM launched its IT Automation portfolio when it announced its AIOps offerings that used AI and automation to help enterprises self-detect, diagnose and respond to IT anomalies in real time. Later that year, IBM acquired Instana, recognizing that modern applications and operations required real-time observability. Then, in 2021, IBM acquired Turbonomic which has specialized in helping clients optimize for application performance at the lowest cost with automation. Now, with the acquisition of Apptio, IBM will provide real-time data and actionable insights for leaders to make smarter spending decisions and realize value faster as they transform their operations.
Apptio is an established, growing, and profitable technology business management and FinOps leader with over 1,500 clients, serving more than half of the Fortune 100.
IBM previously announced a definitive agreement to acquire Apptio from Vista Equity Partners on June 26, 2023.
“Our journey with Apptio is a testament to Vista’s ability to create consistent outcomes that drive value for our stakeholders,” said Robert F. Smith, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Vista Equity Partners. “We are proud of our continued momentum, even amidst these challenged market conditions, and look forward to seeing how Apptio’s technology will bolster IBM’s IT automation and AI capabilities in the years ahead. It’s been an honor to partner with a visionary founder like Sunny and we wish the entire Apptio team the best in the next phase of their growth with IBM.”
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. Thousands of 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., Aug. 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — As part of the continued roll-out of our enterprise-ready AI and data platform, watsonx, IBM plans to host Meta’s Llama 2-chat 70 billion parameter model in the watsonx.ai studio, with early access now available to select clients and partners. This will build on IBM’s collaboration with Meta on open innovation for AI, including work with open source projects developed by Meta – such as the PyTorch machine learning framework and the Presto query engine used in watsonx.data.
This will also support IBM’s strategy of offering both third-party and its own AI models. Currently in watsonx.ai, 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.
The future availability of Llama 2 in watsonx.ai will be another milestone on IBM’s generative AI roadmap and is expected to be followed by the coming releases of its AI Tuning Studio, additional AI models in watsonx.ai, and FactSheets in watsonx.governance.
IBM is committed to keeping trust and security principles at the forefront as it continues to roll out its generative AI capabilities. For instance, when users run the Llama 2 model through the prompt lab in watsonx.ai, they can toggle on the AI guardrails function to help automatically remove harmful language from the input prompt text as well as the output generated by the model. Meta also provides an account of their fine-tuning methodology used in their large language models.
Furthermore, IBM Consulting has the expertise of 21,000 data, AI and automation consultants in addition to its Center of Excellence for Generative AI comprised of more than 1,000 consultants with specialized generative AI expertise. These experts can work with clients to help tune and operationalize models for targeted use cases aligned to their specific business requirements.
IBM, like Meta, is a supporter of open innovation. There is value in engaging a robust and diverse community of AI builders and researchers to test, share feedback and collaborate on these technologies to drive further innovation. We are excited to see what these innovators will build with Llama 2 and other models on the watsonx platform.
Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.
AI builders can explore watsonx.ai today via the free trial: https://www.ibm.com/products/watsonx-ai
About IBM
IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider, helping 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. Nearly 3,800 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 business services 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. For more information, visit www.ibm.com.
YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y., Aug. 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — IBM and open-source AI platform Hugging Face today announced that IBM’s watsonx.ai geospatial foundation model – built from NASA’s satellite data – will now be openly available on Hugging Face. It will be the largest geospatial foundation model on Hugging Face and the first-ever open-source AI foundation model built in collaboration with NASA.
Access to the latest data remains a significant challenge in climate science where environmental conditions change almost daily. And, despite growing amounts of data — estimates from NASA suggest that by 2024, scientists will have 250,000 terabytes of data from new missions — scientists and researchers still face obstacles in analyzing these large datasets. As part of a Space Act Agreement with NASA, IBM set out earlier this year to build an AI foundation model for geospatial data. And now, by making a geospatial foundation model available via Hugging Face — a recognized leader in open-source and a well-known repository for all transformer models — efforts can advance to democratize access and application of AI to generate new innovations in climate and Earth science.
“The essential role of open-source technologies to accelerate critical areas of discovery such as climate change has never been clearer,” said Sriram Raghavan, Vice President, IBM Research AI. “By combining IBM’s foundation model efforts aimed at creating flexible, reusable AI systems with NASA’s repository of Earth-satellite data, and making it available on the leading open-source AI platform, Hugging Face, we can leverage the power of collaboration to implement faster and more impactful solutions that will improve our planet.”
“AI remains a science-driven field, and science can only progress through information sharing and collaboration,” said Jeff Boudier, head of product and growth at Hugging Face. “This is why open-source AI and the open release of models and datasets are so fundamental to the continued progress of AI, and making sure the technology will benefit as many people as possible.”
“We believe that foundation models have the potential to change the way observational data is analyzed and help us to better understand our planet,” said Kevin Murphy, Chief Science Data Officer, NASA. “And by open sourcing such models and making them available to the world, we hope to multiply their impact.”
The model – trained jointly by IBM and NASA on Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 satellite data (HLS) over one year across the continental United States and fine-tuned on labeled data for flood and burn scar mapping — has demonstrated to date a 15 percent improvement over state-of-the-art techniques using half as much labeled data. With additional fine tuning, the base model can be redeployed for tasks like tracking deforestation, predicting crop yields, or detecting and monitoring greenhouse gasses. IBM and NASA researchers are also working with Clark University to adapt the model for applications such as time-series segmentation and similarity research.
The news follows IBM’s announcement earlier this year to collaborate with NASA to build an AI model that could speed up the analysis of satellite images and boost scientific discovery. It’s also part of NASA’s decade-long Open-Source Science Initiative to build a more accessible, inclusive, and collaborative scientific community. NASA, along with the White House and other federal agencies, has declared 2023 a Year of Open Science to celebrate the benefits and successes created through the open sharing of data, information, and knowledge.
The model leverages IBM foundation model technology and is part of IBM’s larger effort to create and train AI models that can be used for different tasks and apply information from one situation to another. In July, IBM announced the availability of watsonx, an AI and data platform that allows enterprises to scale and accelerate impact of the most advanced AI with trusted data. A commercial version of the geospatial model, which is part of IBM watsonx, will be available through the IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite (EIS) later this year.
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 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.
Armonk, Ehningen, 1. August 2023 — IBM: 2023: Wintershall Dea, one of the leading independent natural gas and oil companies in Europe that is now evolving into a leading gas and carbon management company, is working with IBM Consulting to establish an AI Center of Competence (CoC) while progressing multiple value-generating AI use cases that support an efficient energy production. Together, both companies maintain strong relationships with Microsoft as a technology partner: On the one hand, Wintershall Dea was already using Microsoft Azure for its data platform while IBM Consulting maintains a collaboration with Microsoft for delivering data and AI projects based on Azure.
Wintershall Dea has launched a comprehensive initiative for scaling AI to better capitalize on data and drive process and production improvement across the enterprise.
Formed by the merger of Wintershall and DEA (Deutsche Erdoel AG) in 2019, Wintershall Dea is committed to technological innovation, employee empowerment and environmentally responsible energy production. As the two companies joined forces, the need for AI to connect and capitalize on data from across the larger organization became clear. Furthermore, the company acts in a standardized environment, relies on strong partner ecosystem, and needs to meet regulatory guidelines. To better capitalize on a huge amount of enterprise data assets, the company established a holistic AI approach. Implementing AI at the heart of the company allows Wintershall Dea to coordinate AI usage across the company: as small, easy-to-implement “fireflies” but also as traditional, large-scale projects. This enables the company to work more efficiently and save costs which allows further investment in innovative ways of energy production. Furthermore, efficient data exchange and access can be guaranteed for the large eco-system of partners of Wintershall Dea.
“We are exchanging more data internally and externally than in the past,” says Kathrin Dufour, Senior Vice President of Digitization and Technology at Wintershall Dea. “And a smooth and efficient data exchange is a crucial process for us as we are working in a standardized environment, and we want to make cooperation within our ecosystem as easy as possible. Harnessing AI is key to reach this goal.”
To optimize their AI approach, Wintershall Dea selected a centralized platform and methodology working with IBM Consulting to support its data journey. IBM Consulting provides access to a huge reservoir of AI experience and the experts have a track record from working with Wintershall Dea on previous projects for more than 4 years now. For the technical foundation of the AI approach, the team at Wintershall Dea developed a component-based architecture using state-of-the art services for data management, data visualization, Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service as well as AI model development and execution on Azure. In particular, IBM provided an adapted version of its IBM® AI at Scale methodology for Azure to maximize the power of the existing platform.
Ulrich Lorang, Vice President of Data Science, Data Governance, and Data Hub at Wintershall Dea summarizes the core idea of the AI initiative: “Driving value through AI definitely is top of mind at every step we are conducting at the CoC. And we already have several proof points that the AI projects empower our workforce and support our business objectives. Looking back, we build up everything from having just a vision until the complete implementation of the CoC in only 2,5 years and I am deeply impressed how fast we as a team managed this.”
With their new AI at Scale approach, Wintershall Dea can build AI projects that are scalable from the beginning. The CoC community was formed not only with data scientists in the headquarter, but also with Citizen Data scientists with different backgrounds e.g., geoscientists, engineers, economists, and others with strong mathematical programming skills – all who could help drive data science projects within their respective teams on site. Through a series of workshops and trainings, the oil and gas company up skills its employees to ensure the growing community is familiar with the business value of AI and the benefits of cooperation with the CoC.
Wintershall Dea primarily conducts two types of AI projects: small, easy-to-implement “fireflies” and traditional, large-scale projects. A “firefly” is a Wintershall Dea concept for conducting a quick, scalable AI project to solve a simple problem, e.g., extracting key values from more than 2,000 PDF documents and feeding that data automatically into a spreadsheet. Other “fireflies” use the power of Generative AI to efficiently summarize reports or search for relevant information in Wintershall Dea’s knowledge base to increase productivity across the company. “Generative AI can fuel a new era of efficiency and optimization, helping to unlock untapped reservoirs of productivity,” says Max Schemmer, Engagement Lead at IBM Consulting.
Besides the “fireflies”, the company pursues larger-scale AI projects that generate foundational technology leadership within the industry. One example includes an AI-driven solution for maintaining its gas and oil wells, started in Norway and now rolled out globally. Especially data from subsea wells in operation are today analyzed with AI capabilities which allows the engineers to detect potential leakages more accurate. This benefit of AI usage not only helps Wintershall Dea to maintain their wells, but also helps to protect the environment and to make energy production safer and cleaner.
Reflecting on the collaboration, Stephan Bloehdorn, Practice Leader AI & Analytics at IBM Consulting says: “Getting to a maturity level where AI is routinely and effectively leveraged at corporate scale requires a dedicated effort that combines business strategy, organization, technology, and company culture. We are very happy that Wintershall Dea has the confidence in us to support their AI journey. With their holistic and integrated approach as well as their drive and energy to achieve real results at every stage of the journey they are a pioneer in AI management.”
IBM Consulting accelerates business transformation for our clients through hybrid cloud and AI technologies, leveraging our open ecosystem of partners. With deep industry expertise spanning strategy, experience design, technology, and operations, we have become the trusted partner to over 3,000 of the world’s most innovative and valuable companies, helping 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.
About Wintershall Dea:
Wintershall Dea is transforming from the leading European independent gas and oil company to become a leading European independent gas and carbon management company. We have more than 120 years of experience as an operator and project partner along the entire E&P value chain. The company with German roots and headquarters in Kassel and Hamburg explores for and produces gas and oil in 11 countries worldwide in an efficient and responsible manner. With activities in Europe, Latin America and the MENA region (Middle East & North Africa), Wintershall Dea has a global upstream portfolio and, with its participation in natural gas transport, is also active in the midstream business. And we develop carbon management and low carbon hydrogen projects to contribute to climate goals and secure energy supplies. More in our Annual Report.
As a European gas and oil company, we support the EU’s 2050 carbon neutrality target. As our contribution we have set ourselves ambitious targets: We want to be net zero across our entire upstream operations – both operated and non-operated – by 2030. This includes Scope 1 (direct) and Scope 2 (indirect) greenhouse gas emissions on an equity share basis. Wintershall Dea will also bring its methane emissions intensity below 0.1 per cent by 2025. We endorsed the World Bank’s Initiative ‘Zero Routine Flaring by 2030’ and continue to support the initiative aimed at eliminating routine flaring in operated assets by 2030. In addition, we plan to support global decarbonisation efforts by building up a carbon management and hydrogen business to potentially abate 20-30 million tonnes of CO2 per annum by 2040. You can find more about this in our Sustainability Report.
Wintershall Dea was formed from the merger of Wintershall Holding GmbH and DEA Deutsche Erdoel AG, in 2019. Today, the company employs more than 2,000 people worldwide from almost 60 nations.
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.
