Cenovus Energy Selects IBM to Boost Digital Transformation with SAP®

Implementation of SAP® S/4HANA® paves the way for process innovation, future growth

ARMONK, N.Y. and CALGARY, Alberta, Nov 25, 2019 — IBM today announced that Cenovus Energy Inc., a leading Canadian integrated oil and gas company, has turned to IBM Services to help modernize its business processes and advance its overall digital transformation. IBM Services will implement a new SAP® platform to help Cenovus integrate and streamline processes aimed to improve operational efficiency within the organization.

Since its establishment as an independent operator in 2009, Cenovus, which employs approximately 3,000 people, continues to grow and develop assets across its oil sands projects in Alberta, natural gas and oil production in Alberta and British Columbia and two U.S refineries where the company has 50 percent ownership. The company purchased most of ConocoPhillips’ Western Canadian operations in 2017 which required implementation of standalone back office systems.  To support future growth, Cenovus recognized a need to update its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) environment, and IBM Services will work with Cenovus to implement SAP S/4HANA®, SAP Ariba®, SAP BW/4HANA®, SAP Business Panning and Consolidation 11, and SAP Fieldglass® software.

SAP S/4HANA will aim to simplify, standardize, centralize and automate Cenovus’s major business processes, providing a foundation for applying innovations and technologies like AI.  The SAP S/4HANA platform will also help provide the flexibility to integrate new operations as Cenovus expands its business.

IBM Services will help Cenovus digitally transform its operations and standardize processes with the implementation of a new SAP S/4 HANA ERP system, providing a centralized view of real-time information across various departments that will aim to improve decision-making and further their position as the industry leading oil sands operator.  IBM Services will utilize advanced implementation methods and automation tools, including pre-configured IBM Industry Impact Solutions, to design, build and configure SAP applications to support the company’s major back office business processes and help accelerate the adoption of the SAP S/4HANA suite of applications.

In addition to implementing the new SAP platform, IBM Services will provide talent and engagement resources to guide Cenovus through the digital change process, helping put in place training for the new systems and new ways of working to drive leadership and cultural change throughout the organization.

“Digital transformation and modernization are imperative to our business strategy,” said Charity Elder, ERP Program Director, Cenovus Energy.  “In working with IBM Services to implement SAP S/4HANA, we are looking forward to leveraging their accelerators and templates to drive alignment to best practice and process standardization, placing us in a better position with business capabilities, operational efficiency and technology.”

“As we enter the next chapter of digital reinvention, the oil and gas industry is primed for transformation, with companies turning to new platforms that will maximize the value of their assets, lower operating costs and continue to improve on their sustainable operations. By deploying a new, modern, end-to-end SAP S/4HANA-based platform, Cenovus seeks to unlock operational insights and innovate faster to better respond to market changes and growth opportunities” said Ross Manning, Vice President, Partner, Canadian Energy Industry, IBM. “By leveraging acceleration methods and automated, templatized tools, IBM Services can help Cenovus with their business transformation journey with SAP S/4HANA.”

The contract was signed in third quarter 2019.

IBM Launches Open Technology to Speed Response to Cyber Threats Across Clouds

Industry-first capability to hunt threats across security tools and clouds without moving data

ARMONK, N.Y., Nov. 20, 2019 — IBM today announced Cloud Pak for Security, featuring industry-first innovations to connect with any security tool, cloud or on-premise system, without moving data from its original source. Available today, the platform includes open-source technology for hunting threats, automation capabilities to help speed response to cyberattacks, and the ability to run in any environment.

Cloud Pak for Security is the first platform to leverage new open-source technology pioneered by IBM, which can search and translate security data from a variety of sources, bringing together critical security insights from across a company’s multicloud IT environment. The platform is extensible, so that additional tools and applications can be added over time.

As businesses move further into cloud maturity, applications and data are frequently spread across multiple private and public clouds and on-premise resources. Attempts to protect this fragmented IT environment often require security teams to undertake complex integrations and continuously switch between different screens and point products. In a recent SANS Institute report, sponsored by IBM Security, more than half of security teams surveyed said they struggle to integrate data with disparate security and analytic tools and combine that data across their cloud environments to spot advanced threats.

Three initial capabilities of Cloud Pak for Security include:

  • Run anywhere. Connect security openly – IBM Cloud Pak for Security installs easily in any environment – on premises, private cloud or public cloud. It is comprised of containerized software pre-integrated with the Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform. Through the OASIS Open Cybersecurity Alliance, IBM has also forged partnerships with dozens of companies to promote interoperability and help reduce vendor lock-in across the security community through co-developed open source technologies.
  • Gain security insights without moving data – Transferring data in order to analyze it creates additional complexity. IBM Cloud Pak for Security can connect data sources to uncover hidden threats and help make more-informed risk-based decisions, while leaving the data where it resides. Through the use of open standards and IBM innovations, clients can access IBM and third-party tools to search for threat indicators across any cloud or on-premise location. Via the Cloud Pak for Security’s Data Explorer application, security analysts can streamline their hunt for threats across security tools and clouds. Without this capability, security teams would have to manually search for the same threat indicators (such as a malware signature or malicious IP address) within each individual environment. Cloud Pak for Security is the first tool that allows this type of search without needing to move that data into the platform for analysis.
  • Respond to security incidents faster with automation – IBM Cloud Pak for Security connects security workflows with a unified interface to help teams respond faster to security incidents. According to IBM Security estimates, security teams have to manage an average of 200,000 potential security events per day, and coordinate responses across dozens of tools. IBM Cloud Pak for Security allows clients to orchestrate and automate their security response so they can prioritize their team’s time. The platform allows companies to orchestrate their response to hundreds of common security scenarios, guiding users through the process and providing quick access to security data and tools. IBM’s Security Orchestration, Automation and Response capability integrates with Red Hat Ansible for additional automation playbooks. By formalizing security processes and activities across the enterprise, companies can react quickly and efficiently, while arming themselves with information to help address regulatory requirements.

“As businesses move mission-critical workloads to hybrid multicloud environments, security data is spread across different tools, clouds and IT infrastructure. This can create gaps that allow threats to be missed, leading security teams to build and maintain costly, complex integrations and manual response plans,” said Mary O’Brien, General Manager, IBM Security. “With Cloud Pak for Security, we’re helping to lay the foundation for a more connected security ecosystem designed for the hybrid, multicloud world.

IBM collaborated with dozens of clients and service providers during the design process, developing a solution to address critical interoperability challenges that permeate the security industry. The Cloud Pak for Security includes connectors for pre-built integrations with popular security tools from IBM, Carbon Black, Tenable, Elastic, BigFix, Splunk, as well as public cloud providers including IBM Cloud, Amazon Web Services2 and Microsoft Azure2. The solution is built on open standards so that it can connect additional security tools and data from across a company’s infrastructure.

“Organizations have rapidly adopted new security technologies to keep up with the latest threats, but are now juggling dozens of disconnected tools which don’t always work well together,” said Jon Oltsik, Senior Principal Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “The industry needs to solve this issue for customers by shifting to more open technologies and unified platforms that can serve as the connective glue between security point tools. IBM’s approach aligns with this requirement and has the potential to bring together every layer of the security stack within a single, simplified interface.”

To further accelerate industry migration toward open security, IBM is also spearheading open-source projects to make security tools work together natively across the security ecosystem. As a founding member of the Open Cybersecurity Alliance, IBM and more than 20 other organizations are working together on open standards and open source technologies to help enable product interoperability and reduce vendor lock-in across the security community.

Designed for the Hybrid, Multicloud World
Seventy-six percent of organizations surveyed report they are already using between two and 15 hybrid clouds, and 98 percent forecast they will be using multiple hybrid clouds within three years.3 IBM’s Cloud Pak for Security is built on open source technologies that support companies’ cloud environments – including Red Hat OpenShift.

Creating Cloud Pak for Security on these open, flexible building blocks allows for easy “containerized” deployment across any cloud or on premise-environment. As companies continue adding new cloud deployments and migrations, Cloud Pak for Security can adapt and scale to these new environments – allowing clients to bring their sensitive and mission-critical workloads into the cloud while maintaining visibility and control from within a centralized security platform.

Cloud Pak for Security also provides a model to help Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) efficiently operate at scale, connect security silos and streamline their security processes. Organizations can also hire IBM Security for a wide range of additional services, such as on-demand consulting, custom development and incident response.

IBM Launches Maximo Asset Monitor, Embeds AI Into Monitoring Solution to Expand Market-Leading Asset Management Capabilities

IBM works with Novate Solutions®, Inc. to Improve Performance of Critical Assets and Operations

ARMONK, N.Y., Nov. 6, 2019 — IBM today announced Maximo Asset Monitor, a new AI-powered monitoring solution designed to help maintenance and operations leaders better understand and improve the performance of their high-value physical assets. An extension of IBM’s market-leading IBM Maximo capabilities, this new solution will help unlock essential insights with AI-powered anomaly detection and provide enterprise-wide visibility into critical equipment performance. The result is faster problem identification that can inform better decisions and reduce downtime.

According to a 2016 report by analyst firm Aberdeen Research, unplanned downtime can cost a company as much as $260,000 an hour. A comprehensive view of asset performance across operations may help reduce downtime, but that visibility has been difficult to achieve due to fragmented legacy systems, data silos and geographic barriers. With Maximo Asset Monitor, organizations can now aggregate data from across the enterprise and combine it with advanced predictive analytics and AI to identify operational patterns. Capabilities like AI-powered anomaly detection can help organizations identify the most important alerts among the hundreds generated daily from critical assets. This can help teams respond quickly to the most critical anomalies and gain greater insights into root cause variables that lead to asset failure.

“As critical assets become more connected, intelligent and complex, the model for operating and maintaining them must evolve. Organizations must move faster to spot patterns and react to maintenance issues quickly, accurately and safely,” said Kareem Yusuf, Ph.D., general manager, IBM IoT. “With the launch of the new Maximo Asset Monitor solution, IBM is helping organizations better understand their data and automate workflows with preventative, predictive and prescriptive maintenance actions to help extend asset life and improve operations. According to IDC, monitoring performance and scheduling repairs with predictive maintenance can reduce maintenance costs by 15-20%, improve asset availability by 20%, and extend the lives of machines by years.“1

IBM is recognized by analyst firm IDC as a leader in Enterprise Asset Management applications.2 IBM Maximo is deployed across 99 countries, seven continents and used by many of the world’s largest organizations. IBM has a long history of working with organizations like Novate Solutions®, Inc. to help monitor and manage their assets and operational performance.

Novate Solutions leverages Maximo Asset Monitor to expand process control services
Novate Solutions is an industrial technology and engineering services firm in California that is collaborating with IBM to develop a new, scalable, remote monitoring and support service for industrial manufacturers. The application of IBM Maximo Asset Monitor enabled by AI and analytics leverages existing infrastructure collected from SCADA systems to detect anomalies to predict system failures. The analysis of data by engineering professionals at Novate’s Support Operations Center provides insights into the root cause of an anomaly and its process implications. These experts are able to identify events that may warrant immediate proactive intervention which enables maintenance and engineering support teams to take action before the control system is designed to react. The ultimate goal of Novate is to improve production reliability and reduce costly unplanned downtime.

“Our goal is to revolutionize how industrial manufacturers utilize data and technology to improve production metrics by providing a scalable service that virtually every manufacturer can afford. We are collaborating with IBM to enable this transformation by leveraging AI technology with IoT data and analytics,” said Rob Mora, executive vice president, Novate Solutions®, Inc. “The ability to recognize anomalies in real-time and proactively make changes to operations can have a tremendous impact on increasing plant reliability and driving continuous improvement for manufacturers of any size.”

Volvo Cars Joins Responsible Sourcing Blockchain Network, Launched by IBM, Ford, and Volkswagen Group; Advancing Ethical Sourcing of Minerals Continues to Scale With This Network

Responsible Sourcing Blockchain Network moves towards operationalization, with pilot succeeded in linking each phase of the supply chain from mine to OEM
RCS Global Group completes responsible sourcing assessments of each participating company
Volvo Cars to apply RSBN in LG Chem supply chain starting in spring 2020
Plans underway to expand from tracing cobalt into other key battery metals, tungsten, tantalum, tin and gold

BERLIN, Nov. 6, 2019 — The Responsible Sourcing Blockchain Network (RSBN), a blockchain network committed to strengthening human rights and environmental protection in mineral supply chains, today announced that its digital supply chain for cobalt has moved beyond pilot phase and is progressing toward use in live production computing environments starting in spring 2020.

Built on the IBM Blockchain Platform and assured by RCS Global Group, RSBN will have continued participation from founding members including Ford Motor Company, Volkswagen Group, LG Chem and Huayou Cobalt.

Volvo Cars joins responsible sourcing leaders in the RSBN
Starting today, Volvo Cars will join the network as its newest member with further partners from the auto, tech and mining sectors expected to join this year.

RSBN and its pioneering participants are building an open, industrywide blockchain platform to trace responsibly produced minerals from source through to end product, with RCS Global assessing each participating entity against responsible sourcing requirements set by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and industry bodies.

We are setting in motion a process of mainstreaming responsible sourcing practices across major industries,” said Dr. Nicholas Garrett, CEO of RCS Global Group. “We’ve reached significant new milestones as we’ve moved beyond testing, proving the merits of this coupled technology and assurance model can extend to a wide range of participants across every tier of the supply chain and to other minerals. The early addition of Volkswagen Group and now Volvo Cars to this collaboration confirms that blockchain technology together with responsible sourcing assurance can help address critical sustainability issues impacting the entire industry,” he adds.

Volvo Cars eyes practical implementation starting in spring 2020
Volvo Cars will be the first company in the consortium to fully apply the RSBN solution in its LG Chem supply chain beginning in spring 2020.  The automaker also plans to apply RSBN to other key minerals found in its batteries, including nickel and lithium in the future.

Volkswagen AG has been working with relevant battery suppliers to address the need for supply chain due diligence and is now aiming to significantly increase its supply chain mapping and auditing activities for key battery mineral supply chains.

Through the RSBN, and other initiatives, Volkswagen AG is utilizing technology toward securing better supply chain traceability and transparency and to connect this information with the sustainability performance of supply chain partners.

Ford states that as they are preparing to launch their global all-electric Mustang-inspired SUV next year, the RSBN becomes an important tool to strengthen transparency and visibility into its global mineral supply chain. Expanding this network beyond cobalt to other battery minerals will compound the RBSN’s positive impact on human rights protection and labor practices.

Achievements of pilot test phase
In initial testing, the RSBN blockchain demonstrated how cobalt produced at Huayou’s industrial mine site in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) could be traced through the supply chain to LG Chem’s cathode and battery plant in South Korea, and then to its final destination, a Ford plant in the United States.

An immutable audit trail captured on the platform delivered corresponding data providing documentation for the initial ethical cobalt production, its maintenance and its ethical provenance from mine to end manufacturer.

RCS Global Group builds on its supply chain mapping and auditing activities for global OEMs and key battery mineral supply chains and has successfully assessed and validated each supply chain participant against responsible sourcing standards developed by the OECD, as well as the good practice requirements of relevant industry organizations like the Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI) Blockchain Guidelines.

Expansion to other minerals
Next to expansion into other battery metals, including lithium and nickel, the platform is also actively working to progress the solution to support tracing other common metals including tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold, also known as 3TG. Further announcements will be made over the initial pilot consortiums in the additional raw materials.

Statements regarding future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only.

IBM Developing World’s First Financial Services-Ready Public Cloud; Bank of America Joins as First Collaborator

New platform designed to help address specific requirements of financial services institutions for regulatory compliance, security and resiliency

ARMONK, N.Y., Nov 6., 2019 — IBM today announced that it has designed the world’s first financial services-ready public cloud. IBM will welcome financial services institutions, and their suppliers, to join the financial services-ready public cloud. Bank of America will be a committed collaborator to use the platform built on IBM’s public cloud. The Bank will host key applications and workloads to support the requirements and privacy and safety expectations of its 66 million banking customers.

The financial services-ready public cloud has been designed to help address the requirements of financial services institutions for regulatory compliance, security and resiliency. This will help financial institutions transact with technology vendors who have met the platform’s requirements. It is the only industry-specific public cloud platform that can provide preventative and compensatory controls for financial services regulatory workloads, multi-architecture support and proactive and automated security, leveraging the industry’s highest levels of encryption certification.

To help develop the control requirements for the platform, IBM has collaborated intensively with Bank of America. The financial services-ready public cloud can potentially enable Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers – from the smallest FinTechs to more established vendors – to focus on their core offerings to financial institutions with the controls for the platform put in place.

“This is one of the most important collaborations in the financial services industry cloud space,” said Cathy Bessant, chief operations and technology officer, Bank of America. “This industry-first platform will allow Bank of America to use the public cloud, putting data security, resiliency, privacy and customer information safety needs at the forefront of decision making. By setting a standard that addresses the concern of hosting highly-confidential information, we aim to drive the public cloud to a safety level that is unmatched.”

The collaboration with IBM marks the next step in Bank of America’s seven-year cloud journey and reflects the Bank’s unwavering commitment to the security and privacy of banking customers while also creating an opportunity to address the unique regulatory and compliance requirements of the financial services industry.

The financial services-ready public cloud is expected to run on IBM’s public cloud, which uses Red Hat® OpenShift® as its primary Kubernetes environment to manage containerized software across the enterprise, and includes more than 190 API driven, cloud native PaaS services to create new and enhanced cloud-native apps.

The project draws upon technology and financial services industry experience earned through IBM’s relationships with 47 of the Fortune 50 companies and the 10 largest financial institutions in the world. Additionally, to help promote a regulatory compliant environment, IBM and Bank of America are working with Promontory, an IBM business unit and a global leader in financial services regulatory compliance consulting.

“The financial services-ready public cloud represents an ongoing focus from Bank of America, IBM and Promontory to help develop a technology ecosystem where regulations can be addressed,” said Bridget van Kralingen, Senior Vice President, Global Industries, Clients, Platforms & Blockchain, IBM. “Together we plan to help our customer address their ongoing compliance requirements, coupled with highly scalable, standardized capabilities that will be built to help serve today’s modern financial services industry.”

“We recognize that we must help create an environment where financial services institutions can address their regulatory requirements and expectations,” said Gene Ludwig, Promontory Founder and CEO. “Bank of America, IBM and Promontory are uniquely suited to help give the industry and vendors confidence in the quality of this cloud platform.”

The financial services-ready public cloud will help give financial institutions an opportunity to more efficiently assess the security, resiliency and compliance of their technology vendors. Participating financial services software providers may benefit from the platform’s security validation. Only ISV or SaaS providers that demonstrate they comply with the platform’s policies will be eligible to deliver offerings through the platform.

IBM Speeds Enterprises Hybrid Cloud Adoption and Innovation by Extending Partnership with VMware

New hybrid cloud offerings help migrate mission-critical workloads to the cloud

BARCELONA, Spain, Nov. 5, 2019 — Today at VMworld® Europe 2019, IBM announced an extended partnership with VMware to accelerate hybrid cloud innovation and adoption across global enterprises. Through new and updated technology offerings, IBM is making it easier than ever for enterprises of all sizes to more securely move VMware workloads to the cloud and leverage open technologies to modernize their business operations.

Enterprises are at a critical juncture in their cloud journey as they begin to modernize their most mission-critical workloads in search of greater speed and flexibility. With data often spread across disparate computing environments, clients are embracing a hybrid strategy in which they’re enabling applications to share data across clouds and on premises environments. To date, IBM and VMware have helped nearly 2,000 enterprises on their hybrid cloud journeys, with clients such as American Airlines, Fujifilm, Veritas, Universidad Europea and others adopting IBM Cloud™ and VMware solutions. Clients who turn to IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions can access secured, enterprise-grade features like the highest certified level of key management encryption, and an established ecosystem of third-party services for backup, security, and more.i

As businesses look to optimize everything from supply chains to core banking systems, IBM and VMware help speed enterprise hybrid cloud adoption through a suite of new solutions that accelerate the migration of critical VMware workloads to IBM’s public cloud in a highly secured, open environment:

  • IBM announced plans to release a beta in December 2019 of IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions Shared, offering enterprises of all sizes more options for hybrid cloud adoption. A new multi-tenant solution on IBM’s public cloud using VMware vCloud Director, it will be offered as an alternative to IBM’s single-tenant solution that provides a client-managed environment with full control for the user. IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions Shared can give enterprises of all sizes a flexible, managed environment where they can directly provision their virtual machines on-demand to address the needs of diverse set of projects and businesses. This will free clients from manually installing and managing updates to their virtual infrastructure or managing multiple third-party vendors, instead allowing them to focus on driving innovation. The new solution will be made available through IBM partners or directly to end users so that enterprises of all sizes can utilize IBM’s public cloud with greater flexibility.
  • IBM is enabling the automated deployment of Red Hat® OpenShift® directly on top of a client’s VMware Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) environments in IBM’s public cloud as a self-managed solution. This is designed to provide customers with an on-ramp for migrating their mission-critical workloads to the cloud by leveraging their existing VMware footprint. Beginning in December, customers will be able to deploy Kubernetes within this environment more easily in order to modernize existing VMware applications or build new applications on containers alongside their virtual machines, all while maintaining the same level of network control and security policies.
  • IBM and HCL Technologies are also collaborating to help clients migrate and modernize VMware workloads on IBM’s public cloud. By onboarding its customers to IBM’s public cloud, HCL will be able to help them quickly modernize their business-critical workloads. At the same time, clients can maintain their cloud with the highest certified levels of security, as well as high availability, to help them with their compliance with data governance obligations. HCL will also work with IBM to transform and modernize VMware applications with Kubernetes and containers leveraging Red Hat OpenShift on IBM’s public cloud.
  • IBM Cloud for VMware Mission Critical Workloads and IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Services with HyTrust Data Control Integration are now generally available, enabling clients to manage and replicate data across regions to aid them in their data compliance responsibilities. IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Services and HyTrust Data Control Integration offers the industry’s highest level of protection for data encryption keys.

“Today’s news highlights the continued momentum we’re driving through our longstanding partnership with VMware and our shared vision to help clients adopt hybrid cloud strategies that can truly modernize their operations,” said Harish Grama, general manager, IBM Public Cloud. “Enterprises are selecting IBM’s public cloud as the best destination to migrate their VM workloads and drive the innovation that will transform their businesses.”

“Cloud is no longer a destination but rather an operating model about which VMware and IBM have a deep understanding,” said Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Provider Software business unit, VMware. “We have helped thousands of large global enterprise customers migrate tens of thousands of mission-critical workloads to the cloud and operate them at scale. Once in the IBM Cloud, these customers can transform applications in ways not possible by simply running them on-prem, taking advantage of a rich set of cloud-native services for application development, AI/ML, machine learning and IoT.”

Adoption of IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions continues to grow as enterprises embrace hybrid cloud strategies to help them modernize their operations. For instance, Veritas and Universidad Europea have turned to IBM’s public cloud and VMware to help migrate their mission-critical workloads to the cloud:

  • Veritas leveraged VMware tools to migrate their mission-critical workloads from on-premises IT infrastructure to IBM’s public cloud. Veritas chose to work with IBM because it offered flexibility and control with its bare metal server offering and had a large global presence with a network backbone that allowed free data transfer between data centers. With IBM’s public cloud, Veritas was able to migrate with minimal downtime, and adopt a hybrid cloud strategy for modernizing their mission-critical workloads including their customer portal, website, and other backend IT systems.
  • Universidad Europea is adopting a hybrid cloud strategy for the next phase of its cloud journey by migrating its IT infrastructure to IBM public cloud. By adopting IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, Universidad Europea will be able to upgrade and expand its virtual campus, its Universidad Europea Online and transform its offerings to address the current demands of digitally savvy students. For example, the university will be able to manage enrollment fluctuations for online courses, offer innovative digital applications to engage the student learning experience and accelerate time to market for new programs and training initiatives.