IBM helps CIOs automate, add resilience, and cut costs
The challenges facing today’s CIOs now include helping their
businesses recover and restart in the wake of a global pandemic. To that
end, IBM announced at its Think Digital conference
a broad range of new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered capabilities
and services that are designed to help CIOs automate their IT
infrastructures.
Market intelligence firm IDC predicts that, by 2024, enterprises that are powered by AI will be respond to customers, competitors, regulators, and partners 50% faster than those that are not using AI*. IBM is addressing this phenomenon by 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.
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 be better prepared to build more responsive and intelligent networks that can stay up and running longer. The solution could help prevent unplanned costs. Unforeseen IT incidents and outages can cost businesses in both revenue and reputation, with Aberdeen pegging an outage at about US$260,000/hour.
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 centre 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 Modernization with AI within IBM’s Cloud Modernization 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.
“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 faster than ever, allowing them to spend critical time solving problems rather than identifying them.”
“In this new era of remote work, sharing information and documents has taken on a whole new meaning to people,” said Aaron Levie, CEO of Box.
“It’s the reason we created best practices for organisations who rely on remote workforces. To help quickly resolve IT incidents, Box is expanding its partnership with IBM to be part of its innovative Watson AIOps solution.”
“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 VP, 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.”
"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 VP and CIO, 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 announced new and updated capabilities designed to give CIOs a playbook for operating in this new environment. The new capabilities are designed to help:
Automate business planning – Cloud Pak for Data, the industry’s only data and analytics platform, has been updated with a host of new capabilities designed to help business leaders automate the access to critical business-ready data. For example, added to the platform as extensions are IBM Planning Analytics, designed to enable users to automate planning, budgeting and forecasting for business; and DataOps capabilities such as IBM InfoSphere Master Data Connect, which enables users to access master data management (MDM) deployments in on-premises environments.
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. Digital workers automate routine work and collaborate with human counterparts to achieve customer and business outcomes fast. The new capabilities can help simplify how organisations digitise automation skills, such as data capture, task automation and business routing.
Automate call centres – IBM Watson Assistant, IBM’s AI-based conversation platform, has also been updated to help intelligently automate the most complex, knowledge-intensive interactions and drive improved customer satisfaction while reducing operating costs. Assistant now has a prebuilt user interface that requires no development effort to deploy and is designed with user experience-based best practices.
Also, 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. Finally, a new feature called “autolearning,” currently in development and due in the product this summer (Q2-Q320), will learn from prior customer behaviour to provide the best, most relevant answers to new questions on the same topic. Just as your human agents improve over time by learning from customer interactions, autolearning will now offer similar capabilities for the virtual assistant.
*IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Digital Transformation 2020 Predictions, Doc # US45569118, October 2019
Market intelligence firm IDC predicts that, by 2024, enterprises that are powered by AI will be respond to customers, competitors, regulators, and partners 50% faster than those that are not using AI*. IBM is addressing this phenomenon by 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.
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 be better prepared to build more responsive and intelligent networks that can stay up and running longer. The solution could help prevent unplanned costs. Unforeseen IT incidents and outages can cost businesses in both revenue and reputation, with Aberdeen pegging an outage at about US$260,000/hour.
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 centre 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 Modernization with AI within IBM’s Cloud Modernization 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.
“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 faster than ever, allowing them to spend critical time solving problems rather than identifying them.”
“In this new era of remote work, sharing information and documents has taken on a whole new meaning to people,” said Aaron Levie, CEO of Box.
“It’s the reason we created best practices for organisations who rely on remote workforces. To help quickly resolve IT incidents, Box is expanding its partnership with IBM to be part of its innovative Watson AIOps solution.”
“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 VP, 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.”
"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 VP and CIO, 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 announced new and updated capabilities designed to give CIOs a playbook for operating in this new environment. The new capabilities are designed to help:
Automate business planning – Cloud Pak for Data, the industry’s only data and analytics platform, has been updated with a host of new capabilities designed to help business leaders automate the access to critical business-ready data. For example, added to the platform as extensions are IBM Planning Analytics, designed to enable users to automate planning, budgeting and forecasting for business; and DataOps capabilities such as IBM InfoSphere Master Data Connect, which enables users to access master data management (MDM) deployments in on-premises environments.
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. Digital workers automate routine work and collaborate with human counterparts to achieve customer and business outcomes fast. The new capabilities can help simplify how organisations digitise automation skills, such as data capture, task automation and business routing.
Automate call centres – IBM Watson Assistant, IBM’s AI-based conversation platform, has also been updated to help intelligently automate the most complex, knowledge-intensive interactions and drive improved customer satisfaction while reducing operating costs. Assistant now has a prebuilt user interface that requires no development effort to deploy and is designed with user experience-based best practices.
Also, 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. Finally, a new feature called “autolearning,” currently in development and due in the product this summer (Q2-Q320), will learn from prior customer behaviour to provide the best, most relevant answers to new questions on the same topic. Just as your human agents improve over time by learning from customer interactions, autolearning will now offer similar capabilities for the virtual assistant.
*IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Digital Transformation 2020 Predictions, Doc # US45569118, October 2019
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