Introduction
IBM continues to push boundaries in the technology world, introducing innovations that empower businesses to thrive in today’s digital age. From revolutionizing cloud capabilities and expanding AI-driven solutions to strengthening cybersecurity, IBM is paving the way for smarter, more efficient, and secure enterprises. With partnerships like the one with Microsoft Cloud for Apptio’s product portfolio, IBM helps organizations make better technology decisions. Collaborating with SAP to harness generative AI, advancing quantum-safe solutions, and launching cutting-edge tools like Granite 3.0 highlight IBM’s commitment to progress. The acquisition of Kubecost, post-quantum cryptography achievements, and the development of AI-driven cybersecurity assistants reflect a clear focus on enhancing performance, efficiency, and trust. Through these efforts, IBM transforms technology planning and supports businesses in adopting secure and future-ready innovations, ensuring they can meet modern challenges with confidence.
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- IBM Brings Apptio Product Portfolio to the Microsoft Cloud to Help Organizations Make Informed Technology Planning Decisions
- IBM and SAP Plan to Expand Collaboration to Help Clients Become Next-Generation Enterprises with Generative AI
- IBM Advances Secure AI, Quantum Safe Technology with IBM Guardium Data Security Center
- IBM Expands Capabilities in IBM Consulting Advantage to Help Clients Maximize ROI of AI
- IBM Introduces Granite 3.0: High Performing AI Models Built for Business
- IBM Brings Enhanced Performance and Efficiency for AI and HPC with NVIDIA Accelerated Computing
- IBM Acquires Kubecost to Broaden Hybrid Cloud Cost Management Capabilities
- IBM-Developed Algorithms Announced as NIST’s First Published Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards
- IBM Introduces New Generative AI-Powered Cybersecurity Assistant for Threat Detection and Response Services
- HCLTech and IBM Announce Generative AI Center of Excellence to Support Clients with Customized AI Solutions
IBM Brings Apptio Product Portfolio to the Microsoft Cloud to Help Organizations Make Informed Technology Planning Decisions
IBM is also expanding the global availability of its software portfolio to 14 additional countries on the Azure Marketplace. IBM Software offerings will be available to clients in countries including Australia, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
The Azure marketplace is a preferred choice for enterprise IT purchases, and IBM offerings on the Azure Marketplace enable customers to purchase software how they want to, while drawing down on their Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment investments. This facilitates access to IBM technologies including Aspera on Cloud SaaS, Netezza SaaS, SingleStoreDB SaaS, Streamsets, IBM Planning Analytics SaaS, and webMethods Integration Suite. Additionally, watsonx.ai, watsonx.data and watsonx.governance are available as a customer managed service on the Azure Marketplace.
IBM and SAP Plan to Expand Collaboration to Help Clients Become Next-Generation Enterprises with Generative AI
“IBM and SAP’s shared approach to generative AI, built on an open ecosystem, trust and purpose-built models, will help empower clients to optimize business outcomes,” said John Granger, Senior Vice President, IBM Consulting. “Our new Value Generation partnership initiative will enable clients to accelerate the path to innovation, competitive advantage and become a next generation enterprise through generative AI.”
“It makes perfect sense to expand our partnership with IBM to help more customers accelerate their cloud journey leveraging RISE with SAP and realize the transformative benefits of generative AI for business in the cloud,” said Scott Russell, Chief Revenue Officer & Executive Board Member, Customer Success of SAP SE. “This expanded partnership will help more of our joint customers reach new heights by innovating through the cloud, data and business AI to grow and transform their businesses.”
IBM Advances Secure AI, Quantum Safe Technology with IBM Guardium Data Security Center
IBM Guardium Data Security Center provides a common view of organizations’ data assets, empowering security teams to integrate workflows and address data monitoring and governance, data detection and response, data and AI security posture management, and cryptography management together in a single dashboard. IBM Guardium Data Security Center includes generative AI capabilities to help generate risk summaries and boost security professionals’ productivity.
The center features IBM Guardium AI Security, software to help protect organizations’ AI deployments from security vulnerabilities and data governance policy violations at a time when generative AI adoption – and the risk of “shadow AI,” the presence of unsanctioned models – is surging.
IBM Guardium Data Security Center also features IBM Guardium Quantum Safe, software that helps clients to protect encrypted data from the potential risk of future cyberattacks driven by bad actors who gain access to cryptographically relevant quantum computers. IBM Guardium Quantum Safe builds upon expertise from IBM Research – including IBM’s post-quantum cryptography algorithms – and IBM Consulting.
IBM Expands Capabilities in IBM Consulting Advantage to Help Clients Maximize ROI of AI
IBM has made the newly released Granite 3.0 large language models the default for IBM Consulting Advantage. IBM’s third-generation Granite flagship language models can outperform or match similarly sized models from leading model providers on many academic and industry benchmarks, showcasing strong performance, transparency and safety scores.
This means IBM’s 160,000 consultants around the world can easily put Granite to work in client use cases from customer service to IT modernization, helping maximize clients’ return-on-investment for AI.
According to David Cushman, Executive Research Leader, HFS Research, “With IBM Consulting Advantage, IBM is applying AI to make its consultants faster and more efficient while also delivering better results for clients at lower cost. They’re at the leading-edge of the industry, building the future in which human expertise combines with AI-powered software to radically change how consultants support clients’ business transformations.”
IBM Introduces Granite 3.0: High Performing AI Models Built for Business
IBM Brings Enhanced Performance and Efficiency for AI and HPC with NVIDIA Accelerated Computing
NVIDIA H100 on IBM Cloud builds on IBM’s work to support generative AI model training and inferencing. Last year, we began making the NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs available to clients through IBM Cloud, giving them immense processing headroom to innovate with AI via our watsonx platform, or as GPUaaS for custom needs.
The new NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU takes this progression a step further, which NVIDIA reports can enable up to 30X faster inference performance over the A100. It has the potential to give IBM Cloud customers a range of processing capabilities while also addressing the cost of enterprise-wide AI tuning and inferencing. Businesses can start small, training small-scale models, fine-tuning models, or deploying applications like chatbots, natural language search, and using forecasting tools using NVIDIA L40S and L4 Tensor Core GPUs. As their needs grow, IBM Cloud customers can adjust their spend accordingly, eventually harnessing the H100 for the most demanding AI and HPC use cases.
By offering direct access to these NVIDIA GPUs on IBM Cloud, in VPC and managed Red Hat OpenShift environments, we are driving easier transformation to gain a competitive advantage with generative AI. Combined with watsonx for building AI models and managing data complexity and governance, as well as our tools for security, enterprises of all sizes have the potential to tackle the challenges of scaling AI.
IBM Acquires Kubecost to Broaden Hybrid Cloud Cost Management Capabilities
Usage of Kubernetes is rapidly growing, with 84% of organizations using or evaluating the technology today1. As datasets grow more complex, modern workloads deployed via containers are being leveraged more widely – making cost visibility, management and resource optimization for these shared resources a pressing concern for cloud practitioners.
FinOps, an operational framework and cultural practice which maximizes the business value of cloud, provides organizations with a viable and strategic approach to managing this workload complexity. With this acquisition, IBM is showcasing its commitment to the growth of FinOps, both by setting the pace for innovation, as well as strategically bringing leading technologies together. The addition of Kubecost to IBM’s FinOps solutions deepens our commitment to FinOps teams, DevOps teams, and the open-source community as a whole.
Following IBM’s recent acquisition of Apptio in 2023, the addition of Kubecost adds best-in-class container cost management to the IBM FinOps Suite. IBM’s FinOps suite combines IBM Cloudability’s FinOps capabilities and IBM Turbonomic’s AI-automated cloud performance optimization integrations in one solution to give teams the ability to inform, optimize and operate cloud investments regardless of where their workloads are hosted. In fact, IBM Cloudability was recently named a leader in the report, The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Cost Management and Optimization, Q3 2024. The need to combine Kubernetes and cloud cost monitoring, financial business insights and cloud optimization into a comprehensive solution can benefit practitioners wherever they are in their journey.
IBM-Developed Algorithms Announced as NIST’s First Published Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards
The standards include three post-quantum cryptographic algorithms: two of them, ML-KEM (originally known as CRYSTALS-Kyber) and ML-DSA (originally CRYSTALS-Dilithium) were developed by IBM researchers in collaboration with several industry and academic partners. The third published algorithm, SLH-DSA (initially submitted as SPHINCS+) was co-developed by a researcher who has since joined IBM. Additionally, a fourth IBM-developed algorithm, FN-DSA (originally called FALCON), has been selected for future standardization.
The official publication of these algorithms marks a crucial milestone to advancing the protection of the world’s encrypted data from cyberattacks that could be attempted through the unique power of quantum computers, which are rapidly progressing to cryptographic relevancy. This is the point at which quantum computers will harness enough computational power to break the encryption standards underlying most of the world’s data and infrastructure today.
“IBM’s mission in quantum computing is two-fold: to bring useful quantum computing to the world and to make the world quantum-safe. We are excited about the incredible progress we have made with today’s quantum computers, which are being used across global industries to explore problems as we push towards fully error-corrected systems,” said Jay Gambetta, Vice President, IBM Quantum. “However, we understand these advancements could herald an upheaval in the security of our most sensitive data and systems. NIST’s publication of their first three post-quantum cryptography standards marks a significant step in efforts to build a quantum-safe future alongside quantum computing.”
IBM Introduces New Generative AI-Powered Cybersecurity Assistant for Threat Detection and Response Services
In addition to being included in IBM Consulting’s threat detection and response practice, the Cybersecurity Assistant will be part of IBM Consulting Advantage, the AI services platform with purpose-built AI assets designed to empower IBM consultants to deliver value for clients with consistency, repeatability, quality and speed.
“As cyber incidents evolve from immediate crises to multi-dimensional and months-long events, security teams are facing the enduring challenge of too many attacks and not enough time or people to defend against them,” said Mark Hughes, Global Managing Partner of Cybersecurity Services, IBM Consulting. “By enhancing our Threat Detection and Response services with generative AI, we can reduce manual investigations and operational tasks for security analysts, empowering them to respond more proactively and precisely to critical threats, and helping to improve overall security posture for clients.”
IBM’s Threat Detection and Response (TDR) Services can automatically escalate or close up to 85% of alerts1; and now, by bringing together existing AI and automation capabilities with the new generative AI technologies, IBM’s global security analysts can speed the investigation of the remaining alerts requiring action. Specifically, the new capabilities helped reduce alert investigation times by 48% for one client.
HCLTech and IBM Announce Generative AI Center of Excellence to Support Clients with Customized AI Solutions
Together with IBM, HCLTech aims to train 10,000 of its engineers and architects in IBM’s cutting-edge AI technologies, specifically watsonx. The adaptive portfolio, CloudSMART for IBM, assists businesses in continuous innovation through advanced technologies, utilizing the latest business and technology insights.
“Driving adoption of responsible generative AI solutions is an important component of our collaboration with Service Partners like HCLTech. Through this Center of Excellence, we plan to empower our joint clients to rapidly explore, experiment and engineer generative AI solutions with watsonx that are designed to meet their current business challenges,” said Stephen Smith, General Manager, Service Partners, IBM Ecosystem.
The CoE will offer clients access to education and training resources covering diverse AI technologies, including watsonx.ai, watsonx.data, watsonx.governance, the watsonx Code Assistants, watsonx Orchestrate, and watsonx Assistant to help skill their resources and provide a platform for building use cases.
