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Sunday Dec 15, 2024
Wednesday, 3 June 2020 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
The challenges facing today’s Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are more complicated and critical than ever before, as these leaders look to help their businesses recover and restart in the wake of a global pandemic. To that end, IBM is announcing at its Think Digital conference 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.
Market intelligence firm IDC predicts that, by 2024, enterprises that are powered by AI will be able to respond to customers, competitors, regulators, and partners 50% faster than those that are not using AI.
To that end, IBM is unveiling IBM Watson AIOps, a new offering that uses AI to automate how enterprises self-detect, diagnose and respond to IT anomalies in real time. Unforeseen IT incidents and outages can cost businesses in both revenue and reputation. Market research firm Aberdeen pegs an outage at about $260,000/hour.
Watson AIOps enables organisations to introduce automation at the infrastructure level and is designed to help CIOs better predict and shape future outcomes, focus resources on higher-value work and build more responsive and intelligent networks that can stay up and running longer.
The 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, such as Slack and Box. It also works with providers of traditional IT monitoring solutions, such as Mattermost and ServiceNow.
As part of the rollout, IBM is also announcing the Accelerator for Application Modernisation with AI, within the IBM’s Cloud Modernisation service. This new capability is designed to help clients reduce the overall effort and costs associated with application modernisation. It provides a series of tools designed to optimise the end to end modernisation journey, accelerating the analysis and recommendations for various architectural and microservices options. The accelerator leverages 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.
Many of the technologies underlying Watson AIOps and the Accelerator for Application Modernisation were developed in IBM Research.
“The greatest challenge for organisations 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,” said Slack CEO and Co-founder, Stewart Butterfield, “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.”
“In this new era of remote work, securely sharing and accessing files anytime, and across all your apps, is more important than ever before,” said Aaron Levie, CEO of Box. “We’re thrilled to expand our partnership with IBM to deliver content and collaboration across Watson AIOps, enabling IT organisations and businesses to get work done faster, simpler, and more securely.”
“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,” said Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President, Cloud and Data Platform, IBM. “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 prioritise 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.”
Amid the changing economic landscape, clients across industries welcome the new capabilities.
“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,” said Roland Schuetz, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of the Lufthansa Group. “Working with IBM to apply its Watson AI technologies has helped us accelerate how we modernise 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.”
In addition to automating IT operations, IBM is announcing a series of new and updated capabilities designed to give CIOs a playbook for operating in this new environment. The new capabilities are designed to help:
“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,” said Erdem Eskigun, Director, Supply Chain Data Analytics and Operations Research, T-Mobile.
“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 optimisation, sales forecasting, customer return predictions, and supply chain optimisation. Now, we can go from idea inception to delivery to business users much quicker.
“Today’s news expands on the recently-announced business solutions for COVID-19 disruption that are already helping businesses navigate the uncertainty of today’s business environment. Leading businesses and institutions are turning to IBM services and our leadership in cloud, data and AI solutions to help with recovery during this pandemic.”
