At the Think Digital conference, IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced it launched new automation tools for CIOs and a set of new 5G services. These are the details.
Automation Tools For CIOs
As Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are looking to help businesses recover and restart following the lengthy work from home orders associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the challenges are more complicated and critical than ever before.
At the Think Digital conference, IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced a broad range of new AI-powered capabilities and services that are designed to help CIOs automate their IT infrastructures to be more resilient to future disruptions and to help reduce costs. IDC is predicting that by 2024, enterprises that are powered by artificial intelligence will be able to respond to customers, competitors, regulators, and partners 50% faster than those that are not using the technology.
Specifically, IBM is unveiling IBM Watson AIOps — which is a new offering that uses AI to automate how enterprises self-detect, diagnose, and respond to IT anomalies in real-time. And unforeseen IT incidents and outages can cost businesses in both revenue and reputation. Outages can cost businesses around $260,000/hour, according to Aberdeen.
Watson AIOps enables organizations to introduce automation at the infrastructure level. And it is designed to help CIOs better predict and shape future outcomes, focus resources on higher-value work, and build up more responsive and intelligent networks that can stay up and running longer.
This new solution is built on the latest release of Red Hat OpenShift to run across hybrid cloud environments and works in concert with technologies at the center of today’s distributed work environment like Slack and Box. And it also works with providers of traditional IT monitoring solutions such as Mattermost and ServiceNow.
IBM also unveiled the Accelerator for Application Modernization with AI within the IBM’s Cloud Modernization service. And this new capability is designed to help clients reduce the overall effort and costs associated with application modernization. This solution provides a series of tools designed to optimize the end to end modernization journey, accelerating the analysis, and recommendations for various architectural and microservices options. And the accelerator utilizes continuous learning and interpretable AI models to adapt to the client’s preferred software engineering practices and stays up-to-date with the evolution of technology and platforms.
Along with automating IT operations, IBM (NYSE: IBM) is announcing a series of new and updated capabilities designed to give CIOs a playbook for operating in this new environment. And the new capabilities are designed to help:
1.) Automate Business Planning – IBM Cloud Pak for Data — which is IBM’s fully-integrated data and AI platform —has been updated with a host of new capabilities designed to help business leaders automate the access to critical business-ready data. As extensions added to the platform include IBM Planning Analytics (designed to enable users to automate planning, budgeting and forecasting for business) and DataOps capabilities like IBM InfoSphere Master Data Connect — which enables users to access MDM deployments in on-premises environments.
2.) Automate Business Operations – A major new update to IBM Cloud Pak for Automation, software for designing, building and running automation apps — enables clients to more easily create AI “digital worker” automation solutions. And digital workers automate routine work and collaborate with human counterparts. These new capabilities can help simplify how organizations digitize automation skills, such as data capture, task automation and business routing.
3.) Automate Call Centers – IBM’s AI-based conversation platform Watson Assistant — has also been updated to help intelligently automate the most complex, knowledge-intensive interactions, and drive improved customer satisfaction while reducing operating costs. And Assistant now has a pre-built user interface that requires no development effort to deploy and is designed with user experience-based best practices. Plus new integrations to some of the leading customer service platforms preserve clients’ existing investments in those services and allows users to reach live agents with ease. There is also a new feature called “autolearning” (currently in development and due in the product this summer) will learn from prior customer behavior to provide the best, most relevant answers to new questions on the same topic. Just as human agents improve over time by learning from customer interactions, autolearning will now offer similar capabilities for the virtual assistant.
Key Quotes About The Automation Tools For CIOs:
“What we’ve learned from companies all over the world is that there are three major factors that will determine the success of AI in business – language, automation, and trust. The COVID-19 crisis and increased demand for remote work capabilities are driving the need for AI automation at an unprecedented rate and pace. With automation, we are empowering next-generation CIOs and their teams to prioritize the crucial work of today’s digital enterprises—managing and mining data to apply predictive insights that help lead to more impactful business results and lower cost.”
– IBM Senior Vice President of Cloud and Data Platform Rob Thomas
“The greatest challenge for organizations is one of alignment. Slack is most valuable when it integrates tightly with the other tools customers use every day, bringing critical business information into channels where it can be collaborated on by teams. By using Slack with Watson AIOps, IT operators can effectively collaborate on incident solutions, allowing them to spend critical time-solving problems rather than identifying them.”
– Slack CEO and Co-founder Stewart Butterfield
“In this new era of remote work, securely sharing and accessing files anytime, and across all your apps, is more important than ever before. We’re thrilled to expand our partnership with IBM to deliver content and collaboration across Watson AIOps, enabling IT organizations and businesses to get work done faster, simpler, and more securely.”
– Box CEO Aaron Levie
“Our industry was hit hard by the pandemic. Our work in AI over the past several years will help us to mitigate some of the future challenges. Working with IBM to apply its Watson AI technologies has helped us accelerate how we modernize our Data Science Tool Landscape. We use AI to automate processes that result in benefits such as highly responsive customer care and operational topics. In this way, we are making an important contribution to a solid start after the crisis.”
– Roland Schuetz, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of the Lufthansa Group
“To operate effectively in the current environment, T-Mobile is focused on ensuring a more responsive and agile supply chain, while saving costs and delivering superior customer service. IBM Cloud Pak for Data brings together disparate databases from across our company and enables us to test and develop analytics models for projects ranging from inventory replenishment to transportation optimization, sales forecasting, customer return predictions, and supply chain optimization. Now, we can go from idea inception to delivery to business users much quicker.”
-Erdem Eskigun, Director of Supply Chain Data Analytics and Operations Research at T-Mobile
New 5G Services
At the Think Digital conference, IBM (NYSE: IBM) also announced new services and solutions backed by a broad ecosystem of partners to enable enterprises and telecommunications companies to speed their transition to edge computing in the 5G era. This effort is combining IBM’s experience and expertise in multi-cloud environments with Red Hat’s open-source technology — which became part of IBM last year in one of the biggest tech acquisitions of all time.
For organizations around the world, the rollout of wireless 5G telecommunications networks — which bring blazing speed and extremely low latency and minimal transmission delays to mobile data — is designed to accelerate the utility of edge computing. And with new edge services, IBM Business Partners and open multicloud solutions from IBM, enterprises can tap into the potential of 5G to support crucial uses like emergency response, robotic surgery, or connected-vehicle safety features that benefit from the few milliseconds latency saved by not having to send workloads to a centralized cloud.
IBM’s new offerings run on Red Hat OpenShift, the leading enterprise Kubernetes platform that runs everywhere (from the data center to multiple public clouds to the edge). And they enable enterprises to overcome the complexity of managing workloads across a massive volume of devices from different vendors and provide telcos the agility they need to quickly deliver edge-enabled services to customers. Plus clients across industries can now fully realize the benefits of edge computing, including running AI and analytics at the edge to achieve insights closer to where the work is done.
The new solutions include:
1.) IBM Edge Application Manager – IBM Edge Application Manager is an autonomous management solution to enable AI, analytics, and IoT enterprise workloads to be deployed and remotely managed, delivering real-time analysis, and insight at scale. And the solution enables the management of up to 10,000 edge nodes simultaneously by a single administrator. This is the first solution to be powered by a breakthrough open-source project (Open Horizon), created by IBM engineers designed to enable a single person to securely manage such a vast network of edge devices.
2.) IBM Telco Network Cloud Manager – IBM Telco Network Cloud Manager is a new solution offered by IBM that runs on Red Hat OpenShift to deliver intelligent automation capabilities to orchestrate virtual and container network functions in minutes. And service providers will have the ability to manage workloads on both Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenStack Platform — which will be critical as telcos increasingly look for ways to modernize their networks for greater agility and efficiency and to provide new services today and as 5G adoption expands.
3.) A portfolio of edge-enabled applications and services, including IBM Visual Insights, IBM Production Optimization, IBM Connected Manufacturing, IBM Asset Optimization, IBM Maximo Worker Insights, and IBM Visual Inspector. All of these features offer to give clients the flexibility to deploy AI and cognitive applications and services at scale.
4.) New dedicated IBM Services teams for edge computing and telco network cloud that draw on IBM’s deep expertise to help clients deliver 5G and edge-enabled solutions across all industries.
IBM is also announcing the IBM Edge Ecosystem —through which an increasingly broad set of ISVs, GSIs, etc. — will be helping enterprises capture the opportunities of edge computing with a variety of solutions built upon IBM’s technology. And IBM is also creating the IBM Telco Network Cloud Ecosystem, bringing together a set of partners across the telecommunications industry that offer a breadth of network functionality that helps providers deploy their network cloud platforms.
These open ecosystems of equipment manufacturers, networking, and IT providers and software providers include Cisco, Dell Technologies, Juniper Networks, Intel, NVIDIA, Samsung, Packet, an Equinix Company, Hazelcast, Sysdig, Turbonomic, Portworx, Humio, Indra Minsait, Eurotech, Arrow Electronics, ADLINK, Acromove, Geniatech, SmartCone, CloudHedge, Altiostar, Metaswitch, F5 Networks and ADVA as members.
Businesses that have been working with IBM already to deploy edge computing technologies include Vodafone Business — which is working with IBM to help improve worker safety and productivity in remote locations such as oil rigs, factories, warehouses, ports and mines. And combining Vodafone Mobile Private Networks, IBM Edge Application Manager and Red Hat OpenShift, the new solution uses sensors, AI, and predictive and video analytics to understand and respond to incidents in milliseconds, keeping workers safe.
Samsung is working with IBM and telecommunications provider M1 to develop and test Industry 4.0 solutions using 5G and edge computing for Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA).
Equinix is working on a reference architecture that brings the IBM Cloud Paks ecosystem to the edge of the network. And with its interconnected Edge Metal infrastructure (powered by Packet bare metal technology), Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Edge Application Manager, enterprises are able to build edge applications once and deploy anywhere.
Key Quotes About The New 5G Services:
“In today’s uncertain environment, our clients are looking to differentiate themselves by creating more innovative, responsive user experiences that are adaptive and continuously available – from the data center all the way out to the edge. IBM is helping clients unlock the full potential of edge computing and 5G with hybrid multicloud offerings that bring together Red Hat OpenShift and our industry expertise to address enterprise needs in a way no other company can.”
-Denis Kennelly, general manager of IBM Hybrid Cloud
“At Vodafone Business, our primary focus is keeping our customers and their employees connected and safe, whether remote working or working from remote locations. Vodafone Mobile Private Networks, IBM edge computing and AI technologies enable companies to oversee operations even in the most remote locations, where rapid action can mean the difference between a near miss and a disaster.”
– Vinod Kumar, CEO of Vodafone Business.
“5G and edge will enable massive innovation for manufacturers, with 5G networks enabling phones and devices at the edge to deliver new AI-driven improvements to quality, productivity and safety. But the ability to achieve the scale and effectively manage the connectivity of the vast number of devices and sensors in a manufacturing environment is complex,” said KC Choi, EVP of Global B2B Sales, Samsung Electronics. “To address this challenge and enable Industry 4.0 innovation at scale, we’re collaborating to put IBM’s edge computing and AI solutions and Samsung end-to-end 5G network platform and mobile devices to work. Together, we’ll deliver new 5G enabled solutions leveraging sound and video insights as well as augmented reality to uncover anomalies that can occur throughout the manufacturing process.”
– K.C. Choi, Corporate EVP / Head of Group, Global Mobile B2B Team at Samsung Electronics
“Working with IBM on our Edge Metal Private Beta is a perfect example of how collaboration can enable enterprises to tap into the power of hybrid cloud for low-latency use cases With interconnected, automated bare metal paired with edge computing and hybrid multi-cloud solutions from IBM and Red Hat, our customers can tap into a blueprint for rapid innovation at the network edge. Our Metro Edge locations will also have the advantage of enabling consolidation from the remote on-premises locations (edge-in) or migration from the cloud (cloud-out) and yet still remain close enough to where data is created and actions are taken to reduce latency, avoid bandwidth constraints, and retain a high level of operational resilience.”
– Zac Smith, Managing Director of Bare Metal at Equinix
